Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #9: The Operating Cadence: Where Org Design Becomes Execution

Org design does not become real when the chart is announced. It becomes real when the weekly business review changes, when escalation paths are used, when dashboards expose the right tradeoffs, when planning forces choices, and when decisions are logged instead of re-litigated. The operating cadence is the management
1 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #8: Why 'Good Process' Goes Bad (And the Design Rules That Prevent It)

Every process was created for a reason. A mistake happened, a risk surfaced, quality slipped, money leaked, a customer escalated, or an audit exposed a gap. Someone built a repeatable way to prevent it. Then the context changed. The process stayed. That is how good process becomes bureaucracy: not because
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #7: What Should Your Organization Actually Be?

Before reorganizing who reports to whom, ask a prior question: what should the organization be optimized to do, and what unit of organization is the right container for that work? This sounds basic. It is not. Most redesigns jump straight to reporting lines and skip it. The result is a
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #6: How Scale Changes Everything (And Why Reorganizations Fail)

Case in point: When Amazon moved from a functional engineering structure to a distributed service-oriented architecture in the early 2000s, the driver was not philosophical preference — it was information cost. A single engineering organization building a monolithic e-commerce platform had become a coordination bottleneck: every significant technical decision
4 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #5: The Informal Power Map (Who Actually Gets Things Done)

Case in point: Wells Fargo's cross-selling scandal (2011–2016) is a case study in pathological informal power operating underneath formal structure. The formal incentive system — aggressive sales quotas for retail bankers — created informal pressure that no formal policy could contain. Branch managers developed informal systems to meet
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #4: Incentives Are the Infrastructure of Behavior

Case in point: Amazon's early incentive system for its Associates program — third-party affiliates earning commissions on referred sales — created a documented incentive to game review ratings. Affiliates promoting products through comparison pages had no quality incentive: they earned on volume, not on whether customers were satisfied with
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #3: The Coordination Trap (And How to Escape It)

Case in point: The 2018 investigations into Boeing's 737 MAX crashes revealed a structural coordination failure spanning engineering, regulatory affairs, and program management. The Seattle engineering team and the Boeing executive team in Chicago were separated by organization, incentive structure, and physical distance. The FAA's delegated
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #2: Decision Rights: Who's Actually Allowed to Decide What

Ask two teams what they own and you'll usually get answers that overlap. Ask who has final say on a specific class of decisions and you'll usually get answers that conflict. That is where a lot of organizational noise comes from: duplicated effort, stalled initiatives, passive
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