Organizational restructuring

While management skills can improve service systems, a manager is better off if he or she first has a clear understanding of the operating characteristics that set one service system apart from another. This author offers one view of services, which, if followed, results in a “rational approach to the rationalization” of services. His view, […]

Beneath the general principles, attitudes, and ideals of “human relations” lie the actual tactics and day-to-day techniques by which executives achieve, maintain, and exercise power. In the current enthusiasm for “democratizing” business procedures, these hard, practical devices tend to be overlooked. Yet they exist just the same—and, in many ways, do not depart substantially from […]

Research on downsizing, gender, and race.

Big companies formerly took a reputational hit when they laid off massive numbers of workers. But according to E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew Kraatz, of the University of Illinois, U.S. business culture norms gradually changed from 1985 to 1994 as new ideas about boosting shareholder value took hold in executive suites and boardrooms. At the […]

In a postindustrial economy is the value chain obsolete?

Most companies default to the same approach for executing each new strategy. Here’s a framework for your journey.

When retailers' sales slip, the biggest opportunity to boost profits comes from improving execution. To do that, research shows, managers may actually...

What do IBM, Texas Instruments, Owens Corning, and Duke Power have in common? They’re all redesigning their organizations around their core processes—and reaping enormous benefits as a result.

With his talk of “the shrinking half-life of ideas,” “virtual team networks,” and “breakthrough thinking,” John Browne sounds more like a Silicon Valley CEO than the head of the giant British Petroleum Company. Then again, BP—with its flat organization, entrepreneurial business units, web of alliances, and surging profits—is starting to look and act like a […]

Deep, lasting culture change requires an integrated approach that remodels a company’s social systems. The leadership team of Home Depot employed a remarkable set of tools to do that.

The vice president of services of a large durables manufacturing company recently faced a dilemma. Her request for a stand-alone word processor to solve operating problems in her fastest-growing sales office had been denied. It had seemed a trivial request; yet having to do without the word processor would cause delays, and she thought that […]

Continuous improvement at Toyota Motor Company is now a business legend. For three decades, Toyota enlisted its employees in a relentless drive to find faster, more efficient methods to develop and make low-cost, defect-free cars. The results were stupendous. Toyota became the benchmark in the automobile industry for quality and low cost. The same, however, […]

The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider […]

Six strategies to help you navigate layoffs, reorgs, and economic instability.

Ask any CEO who has overseen a corporate transformation what should have been handled differently, and you are likely to get this answer: "We should have...

Even the best-designed systems can’t overcome faulty relationships.

The trend is to downsize corporate headquarters--but sometimes a bigger HQ is better.

Shareholders, who are the most important constituency of the modern corporation because they bear its residual risk, benefit most directly from acquisitions...

In appraising performance, designing pay systems, and in organizing and planning work, managers make assessments about the size and importance of jobs. Whether the assessments are accurate deeply affects how well the organization runs. But what do we mean when we say that one job is bigger than another? Bigger in what sense? One way […]

Years ago, while visiting friends in the United States, I happened to see the classic children’s film The Wizard of Oz. Near the end, Dorothy at last appears before the all-powerful wizard—a terrifying image of smoke and light. Only when her dog, Toto, tugs at a curtain over to one side does she see a […]