Leading Organization Design: How to Make Organization Design Decisions to Drive the Results You Want

by Gregory Kesler, Amy Kates

Praise for Leading Organization Design

"Designing organizations for performance can be a daunting task. Kesler and Kates have done an admirable job distilling the inherent complexity of the design process into manageable parts that can yield tangible results. Leading Organization Design provides an essential hands-on roadmap for any business leader who wants to master this topic." —Robert Simons, Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

"Kesler and Kates have encapsulated their wealth of knowledge and practical experience into an updated model on organizational design that will become a new primer on the subject." —Neville Isdell, retired chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company

"In today's world of global business, organizational design is a critical piece of long-term success. Kesler and Kates have captured multiple approaches to optimize global opportunities, while highlighting some of the keys to managing through organizational transition. A great read for today's global business leaders." —Charles Denson, president, Nike Brand

"Leading Organization Design has some unique features that make it valuable. It is one of the few and certainly only recent books to take us through an explicit process to design modern organizations. This is accomplished with the five-milestone process. The process is not a simple cookbook. Indeed, the authors have achieved a balance between process and content. In so doing, Kesler and Kates show us what to do as well as how to do it."—Jay Galbraith, from the Foreword

"Sheds light on the challenges of organization design in a complex enterprise and more importantly provides aninsightful and practical roadmap for business decisions."—Randy MacDonald, SVP, human resources, IBM

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Leadership

341 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 2, 2010

Reviews

[Jenn Raley · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Tanisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Amar · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome

[Nancy Santiago]

Easy read and very informative.