Tag

Organizational Design

Organizational Design 4 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #10: The Redesign Playbook: How to Actually Fix an Organization

Good organizational design is boring, political, constrained, and iterative. That is why it works when theater does not. This post assumes you have already read the diagnostic series. You know how to map decision rights, information flow, handoffs, incentives, and informal power. You have your baseline measurements. You have a
Organizational Design 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 system
Organizational Design 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
Organizational Design 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
Organizational Design 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 required navigating
Organizational Design 3 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 quotas:
Organizational Design 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 their
Organizational Design 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
You've successfully subscribed to Antoine Buteau
Great! Next, complete checkout to get full access to all premium content.
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Unable to sign you in. Please try again.
Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.
Error! Stripe checkout failed.
Success! Your billing info is updated.
Error! Billing info update failed.
Press ESC to close.