Bridging Organization Design and Performance: Five Ways to Activate a Global Operation Model

by Amy Kates, Gregory Kesler

Five practical steps to enhance organization effectiveness on a global scale Bridging Organization Design and Performance is a handbook for leaders looking to enhance the success of their organizations and themselves. Companies that compete globally require organizational operating models as robust as their strategies. Many companies have created elegant designs and consider their worldwide, matrix organizations sources of competitive advantage. However, the reality is that these complex structures bring many challenges and senior executives are often frustrated by the difficulties of delivering growth in organizations that span numerous brands, products, and geographic regions.After working closely with over twenty large US and Europe based global companies during the past decade, Gregory Kesler and Amy Kates concluded that the problem is not in the fundamental design of these operating models. The matrix is not going away. The challenge is to effectively and completely activate the organization to deliver the strategy. This book shares the five practical actions that bring complex organizations to life and help companies gain sustainable results from their global operating models.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 23, 2015

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent how-to guide in designing and activating a global operation model. Very org/gov/leadership focused reflecting the author's expertise. Certainly agree that those are biggest reasons for failure and the book does a great job of providing design guidelines. The book doesn't cover technology and process aspects where most of the transformation cost and resources are (but not a bad thing given the intro nature of the book). Anyhow, lots of great insights and backgrounds.

- why a global operating model is inherently complex, but must make each level of complexity rewarding
-criticality of the anchor layer selection and scope of global functions
- innovation and execution network: I think this is about center of competency/excellence...not totally sure
- handshake (or interlock) : focus on representing 80% of the goals (with 20% connections)
- gov/power: well explained. very difficult area due to executive politics
- great implementation advices (esp, activation begins at the very beginning)

Also, provides great set of assessment tools at the end of the book.