One of my first teaching experiences was with an evening class of MBA students, at least half of whom were older than I was and all of whom had a lot more real-world experience.1 The evening’s topic was organization design, specifically, the choice to centralize or decentralize—a choice with profound implications for the structure of incentives, communication patterns, and decision rights. We discussed how decentralized designs promote innovation, motivation, and autonomous action, while centralized designs support control, efficiency, and coordination. My central (rather predictable) message was about the need to “design for fit”—to match organizational structure to strategy, an idea that ...
Get Beyond Competitive Advantage now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
