The Organization Design Guide

Organization redesign exercises consume enormous time, resources and energy, and yet they so often get stuck midway or fail to deliver the aspired benefits. This groundbreaking book offers a comprehensive guide, enabling executives and their teams to have nuanced and in-depth discussions about substantive design choices. Once these choices are clear, the teams can confidently initiate the change process.

The book brings together the building blocks of organization design thinking into a logical flow. It offers a high-quality framework, with each building block broken down into specific design questions. For each of the five categories of design variables – architecture, processes, culture, people and technology – the book enables executives to discover and weigh up a variety of situation-specific design alternatives. The book steers clear of academic abstractions, simplistic formulaic solutions, flavor-of-the-year debates and misleading anecdotes from today’s superstar firms. It is written for smart executives at mainstream companies who realize that organization design choices are contextual and influenced by their company’s specific history.

The book presents a pragmatic framework that guides managers in search of a conclusive and efficient organization design process. It is relevant to C-suite executives and directors, as well as senior and middle managers, internal project leaders and organization design consultants.

Herman Vantrappen is the Managing Director of Akordeon, a strategic advisory firm serving clients in a broad range of business sectors worldwide. He is also the co-author of the book Fad-Free Strategy: Rigorous Methods to Help Executives Make Strategic Choices Confidently.

Frederic Wirtz leads The Little Group, a corporate advice company focusing on strategy development and organizational performance improvement for clients worldwide. He is also a member of the board of directors of several organizations and currently chairs the board of the Belgian Red Cross.