Blog
Is Strategy still Relevant to Organization Design?
The axiom has always been to start with a clear strategy if you want to design a sound organization. But, is detailed strategy work even relevant in a world where the external environment is continually changing, requiring companies to regularly shift direction and...
To Little, Too Late: Why many Diversity and Inclusion efforts fall short
Diversity and Inclusion programs and initiatives are ubiquitous. While many organizations are making strides in the right direction, too many fall short of their goals and aspirations. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is that too many people still think about...
Start Slow, Finish Fast: Rightsizing Your Organization the Right Way
When organizations are looking to find cost savings, people costs are typically a significant portion of the budget and an attractive target for cost reduction, but beware! Reductions in staffing levels can destroy or erode organization capabilities or “muscle” that...
Organization Design for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We facilitated a meeting in April 2020 for a team of ten people. In the past such a meeting would typically have the eight co-located members sitting together in a conference room and the other two on video. The pandemic meant that for this meeting everyone was...
Using the Right Performance Metrics: Watch out for P&Ls
We regularly work with CEO’s that are frustrated with leader behaviors that undermine enterprise strategy. Simple financial measures, like P&Ls, are an effective way to visibly drive leader accountability, yet they frequently do not match the complexity of today’s...
Chief Ecosystem Officer – Taking Customer Centricity to the Next Level
Many of our clients are asking how to utilize organization design mechanisms to take customer centricity to the next level. Customer centricity is defined here as creating unique product value propositions and strategies to deliver against unmet customer needs....
Culture in the Time of Covid-19
In the time of Covid-19 all conventions are challenged. We are struck with the headline in today’s paper, “To Curve the Coronavirus, Hong Kong Tells the World Masks Work.” We’re dazed by this reminder of the overwhelming power of culture in the way people think and...
Best Practices for Redesigning Your HR Function
We regularly work with leaders of complex organizations that are making changes to strategy that have organization implications. It is natural for them to want to jump right to organization charts and begin moving boxes and lines. However, we advise our clients to add...
Rwanda: When Government is run like a Business
You should visit Rwanda. Most tourists come to this east African country of just under 13 million people to see the mountain gorillas. But, if you are interested in organization and governance you should also follow how this country is developing economically and...
The Organization Model – The design link between strategy and organization chart
We regularly work with leaders of complex organizations that are making changes to strategy that have organization implications. It is natural for them to want to jump right to organization charts and begin moving boxes and lines. However, we advise our clients to add...
Singapore: Using Organization Design to Shape a Nation
Your customers are pushing you to deliver complex solutions of products and services in innovative ways. Sounds like the challenge facing many companies today, no? In fact, this is one of the core strategic challenges facing Singapore. As a visiting fellow to the...
Making the CMO Role Successful: Pay Attention to the Operating Model of the Company
Across multiple industries and geographies, the CMO role is the shortest tenured in the c-suite, slipping to an average of just 43-months in 2019, according to a research from executive search firm Spencer Stuart. Brands listed in the graphic below lost or...
Establishing an Organization Design Transformation Office
Our clients typically don’t run in to issues completing the design phase of their organization transformation. At the start of a project, the CEO states the importance of the design work. Teams are motivated by the challenge and the involvement in the process....
Designing Adaptable Organisations for Tomorrow’s Challenges
Amy Kates, Greg Kesler, and Gillian Pillans teamed up under the Corporate Research Forum to discuss large complex organisations today and mastering the core tension in organisation design – balancing agility and scale. Organisations have always had to make this...
Organization Change? Think like a Marketer
When the time comes to communicate organizational change, leaders tend to default to Human Resources or Corporate Communications to develop the message. While these teams are often highly skilled at communicating, their lens tends to be mitigating risk, rather than...
The Integrated Holding Company: Is Such a Thing Possible?
The demise of the GE business model has called into question the wisdom of trying to find strategic and operational synergies across a diverse set of businesses. GE is stepping away from building an “industrial internet” shared platform and is rapidly paring the...
Transforming Global Functions
We regularly work with leaders of complex, global companies who want to transform one or more of their functions (Finance, HR, Marketing, Supply Chain, etc.). The objective is typically to build new capabilities that will fuel growth while configuring the function to...
Organization Design in China
Organization design and development are relatively new fields in China. But, as leaders of local companies become more sophisticated in their strategies and expand outside of their domestic markets, they are facing the same issues we see elsewhere: legacy companies...
The Fit Between Talent and Organization
Talent is priority number 1, 2 and 3 in most corporate human resources functions today. It’s no surprise, forced by a tsunami of tech-enabled business change and global competition and intensified by one of the tightest labor markets in decades. The investment of...
The Tower and the Square in the Collaborative Organization Model
We recently had the opportunity to speak at a conference of the top 300 leaders in one of our client companies. They are 14 months into completing a major realignment toward global brand business units as well as the redesign of all enterprise functions, aimed at...