"Business leaders recognize the need to continually align their organizations to changes in the marketplace and are seeking guidance from both internal and external practitioners. This book helps consultants, HR and organization development professionals understand the process needed and best practices for implementing, evaluating, and adjusting their organization designs in complex organizations. It offers step-by-step guidance for setting up effective governance and management processes to execute a design, and offers insight into helping leaders gain the skills needed to put the design into action"--
I read this book as I became involved in an org design project as a consultant.
This book presents as an end-to-end framework for doing an org design project. I suspect it would be a good model to follow if you could really do a "turnkey" org design project (but that really never happens). There are things that it doesn't really focus on (good example: change management techniques), though, so you wouldn't want to rely on this book alone, if you were to attempt such a thing.
Having said that, I think there's plenty in this book to "pick and choose" from when undertaking an org design. The detailed instructions for staging a design charette are quite good, and their arguments for doing one are compelling. I also found the design drivers to be a helpful "module" that can be useful regardless of whether you use the entire framework.
I would have liked to see more discussion about how to define the capabilities as a design criteria. There are a few different areas in this book that are like that - mentioning a good technique or tool without going into much detail on how to actually execute.
Note that this book is good for leaders, managers, and HR/OD practitioners. Don't make the mistake of thinking, "This doesn't apply to me, because I'm not an org design consultant." Anyone in management could benefit from some of the thinking in this book.
Why do I torture myself trying to learn org design is beyond me but I know its crucial. Most of the concepts went a little over my head but I could see how someone who lives and breaths org design and design and possibly workforce strategy would find this book extremely helpful.