Organization Design Studio™

[Re]Create the Organization You Really Want™ Leadership and Organization Design for Sustainable Excellence

John Latham

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Setting the Example at the Top – Designing a Custom Leadership System

Join us for a FREE 1-hour webinar on May 14th @ 12-1p ET.  Leading a successful journey to excellence requires leaders at all levels set the example, and it begins at the top. Setting the example at the top starts by designing and deploying a systematic approach to leadership. Webinar Description In this session, you will learn how to create a custom leadership system to fit your unique organizational context and approach to leadership. You …

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What is Great?

We often “throw around" vague words like "successful, effective, and great” but what do these words really mean? When it comes to organizations what is “great”? Some have defined “great” as stock price over a period of 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 …

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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 actually exist because they’re not physical things, but rather concepts or collections of concepts. However, there are a lot of physical things or artifacts that communicate what an organization is and how it works. So if we think about an organization as information, then there are many artifacts that represent the design of the organization and the main ideas and concepts. Everything from understanding the …

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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 key 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 as …

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Three Challenges

Systems Thinking The first challenge is developing a systems perspective and understanding 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 the different disciplines. So much so that the professors, who are really good at their individual disciplines, often know the other people, researchers, and academics, in their discipline, …

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Three Keys to Success

Tenacity One of the biggest 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 solutions and …

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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 …

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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 …

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