WINNER: NYC Big Book Award 2025 - Business: General
How can you redesign your operating model to drive growth, agility and sustainability in a changing economy?
Rethinking Operating Models, edited by Kent McMillan, Greg Kesler and Amy Kates is a practical guide for managers, department heads and organization design and development leads seeking to adapt structures, processes and capabilities to meet today's toughest business challenges.
Written by a team of experts, the book offers proven frameworks and actionable tools to align your model with strategic goals while responding to technological change, evolving markets and increasing stakeholder demands.
You'll learn how to:
- Build agile operating models that adapt to rapid data and tech shifts
- Manage complexity and cost without sacrificing innovation or service
- Integrate sustainability and responsibility into core business design
- Execute mergers, acquisitions and divestments effectively
Packed with real-world examples, this book shows senior professionals how to tailor models to their unique context, accelerate decision-making and position their organization for long-term success.
Themes include: operating model design, organizational agility, transformation strategy, sustainability integration, change execution
Kent McMillan is a thought leader, innovator, consultant, and a regular speaker in the area of operating model and organization design and implementation. A trusted advisor to CEOs and executive teams, he has helped many of the world's most recognized brands to achieve enterprise-wide operating model transformations - solving for their most complex challenges including new business strategies, cost optimization, mergers, enterprise agility, and digital transformation. He has an extensive track record of delivering on clients' ambitious growth, profitability, and sustainability objectives.
As a managing director at Accenture, he has built a world-class team and developed market-leading methodologies and tools, holding two US patents for Accenture's organization analytics and design platform.
Kent recently authored the book 'Rethinking Operating Models' and has written and contributed to numerous research papers and thought leadership publications throughout his career. With over two decades at the intersection of people and technology, he continues to shape future-ready organizations capable of thriving in an ever-evolving landscape.
Amy Kates is Managing Director at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is part of Accenture, and is based in New York, New York. She works with senior executives to assess organizational issues, reshape structures and processes, and build depth of management capability. In addition to her consulting work, she teaches organization design in the Executive MBA program at the DTU School of Business in Denmark and through Cornell University. She is a Resource Partner to the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business at USC and is a member of the i4cp Thought Leadership Consortium. She is an advisory board member for the Organization Design Forum and a board member of the Organization Design Community. She has also been appointed a Visiting Fellow to the government of Singapore for the 2018 - 2020. In 2018, she joined the board of Educate!, a non-profit focused on secondary school curriculum reform in east Africa.
Greg Kesler is Managing Director at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is part of Accenture, and resides in Trumbull, Connecticut. He consults with CEOs and other senior leaders on global organization design and activation, including the development of global executive talent. He has led whole company, global redesign projects for many leading multi-national companies in the consumer-packaged goods, food and beverage, capital equipment, oil and gas, and healthcare sectors. He has developed and implemented succession-planning and executive assessment practices at numerous major companies, partnering with CEOs to assess executive talent. He specializes in designing and implementing global operating models and governance practices in large multi-national organizations.
