Building the Fit Organization: Six Core Principles for Making Your Company Stronger, Faster, and More Competitive

3Think Horizontally

Organizations are typically divided into functional silos: finance, marketing, sales, operations, and so on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this structure, but it increases the risk that the people and the departments within the company will focus on improving their own, internally directed metrics at the expense of the customer. It would be like a baseball player focusing on his home run tally at the expense of his team’s ultimate World Series victory, or like a marathon runner focusing on how much he can bench press and not how fast he can cover the distance. This internal orientation is the natural default of all organizations, a combination of human desire for immediate rewards and evidence of success as well as ...