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 the years compared to other similar companies (e.g., Collins, 2001). While financial performance is an essential outcome to be great, by …
The Everyday Innovator Interview
What is Organization Design Part 1: Why is it Important?
What is organization design? From our perspective, organization design aligns the stakeholders and their needs with the organization's strategy, systems, and 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 …
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What is Organization Design Part 2: What is it?
Some people say organizations don't exist because they're not material things but rather concepts or collections of concepts. However, there are many physical things 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 organization's design 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 growing up in silos and how alignment and integration is a key organization design concept. CHAD Designing the elements, like strategy, metrics, and the things you mentioned, make the organization the organization. I appreciate that you emphasize that …
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, 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 often know the other people, …
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. Even organizations that develop a great design and create high performance, if they aren't building continuous renewal and reinvention and rethinking into their organization design, …
Benefits of Better Organization Design
Fewer Fires I think the first tangible benefit is you have fewer fires to put out. 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. These fires happen both in one-off …
Stakeholders – What’s in it for them?
Chad - Like the title of your book, [Re]Create the Organization You Really 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 …
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 think is attributable to Peter Skillman at IDEO. But I …
