IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/mgmchp/978-3-319-25223-0_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Mission Mastery: Pillar 2—Organization Design

In: Mission Mastery

Author

Listed:
  • Brian Dive

    (Fairlawn)

Abstract

This is the fulcrum chapter of this book. Firstly, because command does not highlight the need for good organization : that had been established centuries ago in a military setting and was therefore taken for granted. Secondly, faulty design is consistently the abiding weakness in the civilian organizations I have encountered around the world in the last 50 years or so. It is the missing link, which undermines their leadership development regimes. Organization design consists of two axes: one horizontal (its reach) the second vertical (its height.) In the 1970s I did a lot of research into effective design of the horizontal axis under the leadership of Roger Roes. We focused on issues of shape, such as geographical, functional, divisional and matrices delving into the right balance between centralisation/decentralisation, spans of control, over specialisation and unnecessary duplication. In the 1980s I realised the driver of effectiveness is the vertical axis. Layers drive spans not the other way round thus it was necessary to have a mental framework to identify the correct height of an organization to ensure the two axes are in equilibrium. My findings revealed many civilian organisations do not have such a framework; hence the focus of this book is on the vertical dimension of the organization not the horizontal linkages, as there is generally no shortage of material on the latter.

Suggested Citation

  • Brian Dive, 2016. "Mission Mastery: Pillar 2—Organization Design," Management for Professionals, in: Mission Mastery, edition 1, chapter 4, pages 77-113, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-25223-0_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-25223-0_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-25223-0_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.