Organisation Designs from Start-up to Global : Dynamic Designs for Growth

"An appropriate design can be a significant competitive advantage, just as an inappropriate design can result in the failure of the organisation."

Over the last 30 years, Michael Bellerby has worked in over 100 organisations designing strategies, implementing operational improvements and radically changing performance. This experience has taught him that organisation design remains pivotal to the success of a company.

Organisation Designs provides leaders with the knowledge needed to assess the appropriateness of their designs. The book helps leaders to thoroughly evaluate the work needed within an organisation, and in doing so make choices on how to divide work among different parts of the organisation. If the design is too complex for the work required, costs will be too high, and if the design is too simple, it will inhibit the delivery of the work. This book provides a framework of the appropriate options available to leaders, depending on the volume of work.

Organisation Designs is not an 'academic' book but rather a guidebook for business leaders to use to design their organisations. This book pulls together existing theories that have proven successful and offer logical explanations of the progressions of designs for small to large organisations.

This is an important book for leaders of organisations of all sizes, as well as their advisors. All concepts discussed are straightforward and clear in their potential application. They have been developed through observing real organisations and the descriptions have been tested with line managers.

Mike Bellerby lives in England after senior consultancy roles in the United Kingdom, Australia and southern Africa. His expertise in business improvement was gleaned through managing change programmes for over 100 organisations in many industry sectors. A fascination with how work is changing through technology and globalisation led to his research into the complexity of work. He wrote a short booklet on structuring organisations with Martin, which was published by Knowledge Resources in South Africa. He continues to mix the development and writing of work complexity theories linked to organisation design and leadership competencies with a role as a strategist for a large financial services organisation.