We often "throw around" vague words like "successful, effective, and great," but what do these words mean? When it comes to organizations, what is "great"? Some have defined "great" as stock price over the years compared to other similar companies (e.g., Collins, 2001). While financial performance is an essential outcome to be great, by itself is not a complete definition of truly sustainable excellence or great. Defining Great The definition …
Organization Design Part 1 – Why is it Important?
What is organization design? From our perspective, organization design is the alignment of the stakeholders and their needs, with the strategy of the organization, the organization systems and processes, and a comprehensive scorecard. These four "cornerstones" are held together by the culture (values, symbols, rituals, and heroes) that support and bring the systems and strategy to "life." The rituals, symbols, and heroes of the organization make …
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Organization Design Part 2 – What is it?
Some people say organizations don't exist because they're not physical things, but rather concepts or collections of concepts. However, there are a lot of physical characteristics or artifacts that communicate what an organization is and how it works. So if we think about an organization as information, then many artifacts represent the design of the organization and the main ideas and concepts. Everything from understanding the needs and …
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Organization Design Part 3 – Alignment
In this segment of The Everyday Innovator video podcast, Dr. Chad McAllister and I discuss the issue of growing up in silos and how alignment and integration is a crucial organization design concept. CHAD Designing the elements, like strategy, metrics, the things you mentioned, that make the organization the organization. I appreciate that you emphasize that the alignment between those, designing the alignment that is so important too. Just …
Three Challenges
Systems Thinking The first challenge is developing a systems perspective and understanding of dynamic systems. We've been talking about this for over 50 years, and yet we still don't teach it in most business schools. We train people in business schools in different disciplines. So much so that the professors, who are good at their disciplines, often know the other people, researchers, and academics, in their discipline, around the world better …
Three Keys to Success
Tenacity One of the most significant issues for success is tenacity. One of the things that we found is that designing organizations is, first of all, never done. So even organizations that come up with a great design and create high performance, if they aren't building continuous renewal and reinvention and rethinking into their organization design, entropy will eventually take over, and they'll decline in performance. So none of these …
Benefits of Better Organization Design
Fewer Fires I think the first tangible benefit is you have fewer fires to put out. So often we spend much of our executive time putting out fires. Working issues between those silos that got mucked up because we don’t have a well-oiled process or culture to facilitate that work between the different functions. This happens both in one-off projects, and it happens in repeatable processes for service delivery. So the first thing is we have fewer …
Stakeholders – What’s in it for them?
Chad - Like the title of your book, Create the Organization You Want, I see a key benefit is making the organization that you want to work in and everyone else wants to work in too. WIIFM John - That’s the "what’s in it really for me,” or WIiFM part right? It’s your opportunity to create the organization you want to work inside of and be a part of. All too often we find ourselves in organizations that somebody else designed. The entrepreneur …
Trial and Error
CHAD - I know you've listened to the podcast some, you know I love innovation quotes, so I asked you to bring one too. What's the quote you have for us? JOHN - So I had to bring a different one this time, and I thought the one that fit what we were talking about the best was one that I believe is attributable to Peter Skillman at IDEO. But I could be wrong. But we'll call it Peter's until we're corrected. It is, "Enlightened trial and error …
