The Economist Guide to Organisation Design

Stanford, NaomiDr Naomi Stanford is an expert organisation design practitioner, teacher, and author. During her earlier UK career Dr Stanford worked in large multinational companies, including Prudential, Price Waterhouse, British Airways, Marks & Spencer, and Xerox. She then spent fourteen years in the US as an organisation design consultant in a range of organisations including the US Federal Government, NBBJ, and Mercer. She returned to the UK to work in the government sector. She is now an independent consultant working with clients in the Middle East and Europe. She writes books, blogs, articles, speaks at conferences, and tweets (@naomiorgdesign) regularly on organisation design. Her website: naomistanford.com has over 800 blogs on the topic including extracts from the seven books she has written.

Thousands of established businesses fail every year because of the way they are organised, or re-organised. Business survival can depend not only on whether its structures and reporting lines meet the needs of the market, but also whether they can adapt in the face of a rapidly changing business environment.

Yet managers seldom talk coherently about structuring or restructuring their operations, let alone take a systematic approach to this vital issue. Too often, companies are restructured for the wrong reasons - for example, because a new CEO wants to make an impact, or to work around a new IT system.

This revised and updated Economist Guide shows how leaders should think about and implement the design of a company, using five easy-to-use guiding principles:

- Design a company around its strategy and the operating context, not for ulterior or non-business reasons;
- Think holistically - don't restructure just one division without taking into account other operations;
- Consider future markets, customers and trends, not just what works best now;
- Invest time and resources: - a redesign can be complicated to implement and must be done without disrupting daily activities; and
- Go back to the basics of how the company operates and its market position; this is not a repair job to fix a short-term problem.

A new edition of this practical guide on how to structure a
business to support strategy and maximise efficiency.

A new edition of this practical guide on how to structure a business to support strategy and maximise efficiency.