Structural Cybernetics: An Overview

Political in-fighting, limited teamwork, lack of customer focus, weak strategic alignment, slow pace of innovation, fragmentation and disintegration, a bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial culture, pressure for decentralization and outsourcing, poor morale, and too much management time spent resolving internal problems...

Why do these familiar problems seem so ingrained in organizations? Because they are. Many performance problems are unintentionally designed into the organization's structure.

Organizational structure is a science, not a matter of personalities, politics, fads, and intuition. There are twelve fundamental building blocks of structure present in any organization. The way these are combined determines the health and performance of the organization. And the mechanisms of teamwork determine whether or not the organizational design actually works.

Structural Cybernetics is a comprehensive treatment of the issues of organizational design. This brief overview presents the basics of organizational theory, clear definitions of the building blocks of structure, practical principles for designing organization charts, and an approach to high performance teamwork based on a "network" of entrepreneurs.

N. Dean Meyer -- recognized as one of the foremost authorities on organizational structure -- has made organizational health his life's work. He has been teaching, lecturing, and consulting since 1968, and is known for his systematic approaches to difficult leadership issues. Meyer Founded NDMA Inc. in 1982 to focus exclusively on organizational issues. He is widely published, and coauthor of the book, The Information Edge, originally published by McGraw-Hill and now in its sixth printing. His research is documented in two major studies: Structural Cybernetics, and The Internal Economy, A Market Approach. Meyer has implemented Structural Cybernetics in dozens of diverse corporate and public-sector organizations.