Blogs & Articles
ESG: A Perfect Training Ground to Build New Organizational Muscles
Why do companies with strong Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) results tend to perform better financially? Lower operational costs and stronger employee and customer engagement are a few visible reasons. However, our interviews with over twenty business...
Integrating Your Acquisition: Don’t Leave it to Chance
A technology company CEO approached our team to redesign her organization, a mix of legacy and newly acquired teams. The leader wanted to build an efficient, adaptable organization that could benefit from the legacy company’s scale. However, she wanted to be careful...
Designing an Organization with Executive Vacancies
When there are vacancies on an executive team it can be tempting to slip into a holding pattern on enterprise decisions until those roles are filled. Some leaders subscribe to the “let me get the right passengers on the bus, and then we’ll all figure out where the bus...
Quick Feedback: A Small Gesture with An Outsized Impact
“Very nice. You have very good client relationship skills, Sara. I liked watching you in action. It was a difficult situation.” I received this note from a senior partner following a recovery meeting with a potential client. It probably took 20 seconds to write, and...
The Central versus Decentral Dilemma: How the HR Practitioner can Facilitate a “Center-Led” Solution
Today’s organizations need to move faster than ever before. Covid-19 exposed which companies in an industry could change direction quickly and respond to new consumer, employee, regulatory, and supply demands, turning adversity into opportunity. “Agility” is the...
Love your Organizational Problems, not Just your Solutions
As human beings we are hardwired to act. Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert argues that humans are "exquisitely adapted to respond to immediate problems, such as terrorism, but not so good at more probable, but distant dangers, such as global warming."1 As a leader you...
So, you’ve built a new capability, but no one uses it! What gives?
Cari, a leader in the company's new Data and Analytics unit, was frustrated to hear about yet another team which hired an external contractor to do the work her group was set up to do. She had spent the past 18 months building this new organization. She had hired top...
Embracing Healthy Tensions in a Matrixed Organization
As a company strategy becomes more dynamic and ambitious, leaders will often shift to a matrixed organization model to help the business excel at doing more than one thing simultaneously. The matrix is designed to bring forth the voices that need to influence key enterprise trade-off…
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Designing an Effective Cloud Center of Excellence
In many of my recent technology-driven transformation projects, the design and implementation of a technology Center of Excellence (CoE) has been considered as a solution to ensure clear ownership of expertise. However, in some cases, the implementation of the Center of Excellence was…
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Have you designed your change and project management capabilities?
Change management is not just a skill or a process. It is a capability that needs to be designed. In an earlier post focused on transformation governance, we explored the importance of clearly defined Transformation Office infrastructure, well-resourced design...
How to scale shared success through collaboration and trust
Shared success is a goal of most organiza�on change. It is the magic that happens when individuals work together to benefit the whole—not just within teams, but across product lines, geographies and func�ons. Fueling shared success takes more than asking people to collaborate. It requires…
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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...
Too 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...