Designing Organizations

Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels

Jay R. Galbraith

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118463826
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Estrategia empresarial

This Third Edition of the groundbreaking book Designing Organizations offers a guide to the process of creating and managing an organization (no matter how complex) that will be positioned to respond effectively and rapidly to customer demands and have the ability to achieve unique competitive advantage. This latest edition includes fresh illustrative examples and references, while the foundation of the book remains the author's popular and widely used Star Model.

• Includes a comprehensive explanation of the basics of organization design
• Outlines a strategic approach to design that is based on the Star Model, a holistic framework for combining strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people
• Describes the different types of single-business, functional organizations and focuses on the functional structure and the cross-functional lateral processes that characterize most single-business organizations.
• Features a special section on the effects of big data on organization design, and whether or not it will result in a new dimension of organizational structure

Highlighting the social technologies used to coordinate work flows, products, and services across the company, this new edition of Designing Organizations brings theory to life with a wealth of examples from such well-known companies as Disney, Nike, IBM, and Rovio (Angry Birds) to show how various kinds of organization designs operate differently.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Organization design, as opposed to organization theory, is a prescriptive body of knowledge. It is intended to inform the choices of how to organize and manage institutions and serve the leaders who have been entrusted with the stewardship of these institutions. These organizations are purposeful: they have been created to accomplish specific goals and objectives. Organization design is therefore focused on creating organizations through which these goals and objectives can be accomplished.

The knowledge base underlying the choice of organization designs has its roots in scientific management and classical management principles. The practitioners and scholars who developed the knowledge in these areas were searching for the one best way to organize. Those early thinkers created many of the principles, like span of control, and much of the useful language, like centralization, that we still use today. However, it was not difficult to find effective organizations that violated many of the principles of classical management. As a result, modern organization design grew out of efforts to explain these exceptional observations.

Modern organization design came out of a variety of work in the 1950s and 1960s. One stream, developed in the United States, is best illustrated by the work of Alfred Chandler in Strategy and Structure (1962). He found that the different organizational structures we had observed could be explained by differences in companies' strategies. Therefore, different strategies lead to different organizations. This stream, referred to as strategic organization design, is a top-down design process that begins with the entity's strategy and can be applied at the enterprise, business unit, geographical, and functional levels.

A second stream of thought developed in Europe around the work of Eric Trist and his followers (Trist and Murray, 1993). It was referred to as the sociotechnical systems approach. It was bottom up. It focused on the alignment of the technology involved in doing the work and the social system that could be created to perform that work. Sociotechnical systems' thinking and tools are best at designing organizations at the bottom levels of the structure. The strategic design thinking and tools are best used for designing organizations' top levels. The strategic organization design approach is the one that I follow in this book.

Today's Organization Design

The interest in organization design has been increasing over the past couple of decades. One of the reasons is that our organizations have been increasing in complexity over that time. “Doing what comes naturally” is not a sufficient guide to organizing today's institutions. Most leaders today rose up through a far simpler structure. Nor are the old dismissives relevant: “All you need are good people. They'll make any organization work.” And people do make a misaligned organization work, but at a price. The people in an organization that is misaligned with its strategy and stakeholder environment cannot serve its customers and work around the system at the same time. They can perform much more effectively when the system supports them in doing their work. Besides, high-performing companies do not want organizations that just work; they want organizations that excel. The discipline of organization design has evolved along with the increasing organizational complexity and the desire to create high-performing organizations.

In the following chapters, I trace the organizational stages through which companies have progressed from the simple, single-business strategy to the complex multibusiness, multicountry, multicustomer segment strategy. The first organizational stage is the single-business strategy, sometimes called the U form, or unitary form of organizations. Almost all companies start as a single business that is organized around functions, like sales, marketing, operations, product development, finance, and human resources. It is a unitary or one-dimensional form because it is structured only around functions. All people reporting to the CEO are functional leaders. Chapter 3 is devoted to the design of the single business or business unit, I introduce the concept of the lateral or horizontal organization. In order to get anything done, companies have to work across functions to deliver customer orders, new products, and projects. These processes are executed through lateral forms of cross-functional coordination. The functional structure or hierarchy is the vertical form, and the processes are the lateral forms, which vary from informal and self-organizing processes, to formal teams, to the matrix form. Lateral forms are present in all types of organizations, but I present them in a discussion about business units in chapter 3 since they are the principal design challenge facing business unit leaders.

The second stage arrives when a single business diversifies into new business areas. The company then creates a business unit and a profit and loss center for each new business area. Each business unit is another functional organization. The organization design challenge is thus to create a corporate center to govern the various business units. This center typically contains functional staffs to coordinate the functions across business units. The role and size of the center vary with the diversity of the businesses in the corporate portfolio. Since the CEO of the enterprise has both functions and businesses reporting to the center, the company has a two-dimensional organization structure.

The third stage develops when a company expands out of its home market into new host countries. This strategy adds a third dimension—a geographical dimension—to the organization. Initially companies simply add a geographical division to their multiple business unit divisions. But when international sales reach around 30 to 40 percent of total sales, the international division disappears. In consumer goods companies, the division is replaced by regional profit centers, one of which is the home country. In the business-to-business (B2B) world, the international division is split and the parts are added to their respective business units, creating global business unit profit and loss centers. However, in the global business unit structure, there is still an international or regional overlay on the global business units. And in the regional structure, there are global business units that are overlaid across the regions. So reporting into the corporate center are functions, business units, and geographies. The organization design challenge is balancing power and authority across the three-dimensional structure. The resulting power distributions will be driven by the global portfolio strategy (Galbraith, 2000).

The fourth strategy stage begins with a focus on the customer (Galbraith, 2005). Driven partly by demands from global customers like Walmart, companies such as Procter & Gamble, IBM, and investment banks are adding global customer or customer segments to their structures. Another contributing factor is the conversion of products and services into digital offerings. In the digital world, everything talks to everything else. Vendors, like IBM and Accenture, can combine digital hardware, software, and services into smart solutions for their customers. They can easily customize and codevelop applications with customers for customer segments, like financial services and utilities. This solutions strategy is best executed by organizing around the customer or customer segments called verticals. So in these solutions-oriented companies, we find customer segments reporting into the corporate center along with business units, countries, and functions. The challenge for organization designers is to integrate four dimensions into a one-company strategy and organization. Integration becomes the task of the company's processes. As we will see, the more complex the structure is, the more important are the processes.

Inevitably, the question that comes up is, “Is there a fifth stage?” In the concluding chapter, I speculate about a fifth stage. It appears that the forces around big data, meaning the increased volume, complexity, variety, and velocity of available data, may very well manifest themselves in a fifth strategy and organizational dimension.

Drivers of New Strategies

It is natural to ask why companies are continually changing their strategies. What is driving this movement through the stages? Usually managers prefer to keep things simple, so why are they moving to ever more complicated strategies? There are at least two reasons. One is the pursuit of growth. Many companies are driven by a growth imperative. And the other is the continuing fragmentation of the stakeholder environment.

Growth

Every publicly traded company wants to grow and drive its stock to trade at a premium price. If there is no growth, the company's stock is flat and trades like a bond. A high stock price makes it easier to attract capital and reward employees. The elevated stock also can serve as a currency to make acquisitions. More important, talented people want to join a growth company that has a bright future. But while growth is desirable, it also faces limits. A firm can grow only so much in its core business and its home country. So when growth in the core business slows, firms diversify into adjacent businesses and become multibusiness companies. When growth slows in the home country, firms expand across borders and become multinationals. This pursuit of new growth opportunities causes firms to change strategies and move through the stages.

Fragmentation of the Stakeholder Environment

The other driver of strategic change is the movement from mass markets to ever smaller market segments. In the twentieth century, businesses used mass production to supply mass merchants to serve the mass market. Now, with ever-increasing data, firms can focus on ever smaller customer segments. Consulting firms can now identify 650 microsegments in the food market. Some of these microsegments are declining, some are flat, and others are growing. So food companies are focusing on these growth microsegments, like Hispanic moms and senior foodies. Both the growth imperative and market fragmentation lead to customer-focused strategies.

So it is largely the growth imperative and market segmentation that drive firms to continually evolve their strategies. But not all companies progress through all of the stages. Some companies, like utilities and defense firms, remain domestic enterprises, and some family-owned companies remain in a single business. Andersen, Marvin, and Pella focus largely on residential windows and doors. Most companies, however, become three-dimensional, multinational enterprises like General Mills, Pfizer, Siemens, Canon, and Johnson & Johnson, while others, like Experian and Nike, progress or are progressing through four or even five stages. My point is that different strategies drive different organization designs. It is not size or industry that is the primary shaper of different organizational forms. Size, industry, and nationality all have their effects, but in this book, I start with strategy to begin the design process.

The other point about strategy stages that is important for organization design is that the strategies are cumulative. Chandler called this feature concatenation. That is, a multibusiness enterprise also has stage 1, single-business strategies that guide its business units. And when the stage 2 enterprise expands across borders, it adds third-stage international strategies to its stage 2 multifunction, multibusiness strategies. This cumulative stage-wise progression is what increases the complexity of organization designs and gives organization design its challenge and its priority to create high-performing enterprises.

Drivers of Organization Designs

There are three major shapers of organization designs. The first is the one that we have been discussing: the diversity and variety of units that must be coordinated for the company to execute its mission. The second is the degree of interdependence between these diverse units. Usually the units in a company are not independent but require coordination, and the amount depends on the degree of interdependence. This interdependence results from the initial division of labor into functional specialties that are needed to execute the business's activities. The third factor is the dynamics of change associated with a business. The dynamics consist of the rate or pace of change combined with its predictability. The predictability of change is the key. Even if a business is subject to constant change, if that change is predictable, a company can use plans and schedules to coordinate interdependence among units. If each unit can meet its planned goals and delivery schedules, the organization greatly reduces the amount of ongoing communication that it needs to coordinate its work. It is when change is constant and unpredictable that plans and schedules need constant revision and renegotiation. These organizations require designs that permit high levels of communication, flexibility, and adaptation.

Variety and Diversity

It is actually the interaction of the three shapers—variety, interdependence, and change dynamics—that drives organization designs. To illustrate, let us start with a single business that conducts its affairs through seven functions: development (of products and services), operations, marketing, procurement, sales, finance, and human resources. These seven functions must coordinate their efforts to conduct normal business for the existing product already in the market. They must also synchronize their activities to launch a new product, and they probably need to agree on the priority and features of the next product in development. The communication and decision making to arrive at the plans and schedules for the existing product in a seven-function organization must take place across twenty-one interfaces. (Links = ½ n [n – 1]. Thus, 21 = ½ × 7 [6].) Communication and collaboration must also take place across these same seven functions and twenty-one interfaces for the launch of the next product and yet again for the initiation of the new product. The process repeats itself for each product that is added to the single-business, functional organization. So variety, as measured by the number of products in this case, increases the volume of information processing and decision making that a single functional organization must execute. And every functional organization has a limited capacity for communicating and deciding. Then when the growth imperative causes the single business to follow a diversification strategy, it will add one or two new businesses. At this point, the coordination task exceeds the company's capacity to coordinate. As a result, it will move to a stage 2, multibusiness company and multibusiness structure. The functional organization does not have the information-processing and decision-making capacity to manage multiple businesses within a single functional structure.

Dell is a good example. Dell started with a single product line of desktop personal computers. In order to maintain its growth, it added desk-side computers and laptops. Then it added new businesses of personal desktop printer, personal desk-side storage, and low-end servers. It also migrated from a single personal computer business into a multibusiness unit, multiprofit center company. It changed its name from Dell Computers to Dell. Each profit center was a functional organization capable of managing a single business, like personal computers, printers, storage, and servers.

Interdependence

Interdependence is the degree to which activities in one organizational unit affect the activities and goal accomplishments of other units. Interdependence has been a driver of coordination since the work of Thompson (1967), who identified three types of interdependence, which increased in magnitude. These types are shown in figure 1.1. The simplest interdependence is pooled interdependence whereby field units, shown in figure 1.1a, share the same pool of funds and talent resources. Other than sharing resources, these field units, like sales units, perform their work completely separately. There is a minimal need to coordinate and communicate between one another. The next type, sequential, shown in figure 1.1b, indicates a higher level and greater amount of interdependence. In sequential interdependence, the output of manufacturing is a necessary input for the performance of the sales function. In order to achieve successful performance, company management must coordinate the flow of work across sequentially interdependent units. The sequentially interdependent units, however, also possess pooled interdependence. The greatest amount of interdependence exists when units are reciprocally interdependent, as in figure 1.1c. The output of both is the input of the other. Engineering design groups are a g...