Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage

Chapter 3. Designing Organizations

Designing an organization is challenging regardless of whether it is HC-centric or structure-centric. Reduce even the simplest of organizations to its bare essentials, and it's still complex, requiring multiple systems, processes, structures, and practices.

Creating a highly effective design is especially challenging because no single feature (no practice, process, structure, or system) can be viewed as a stand-alone "best practice," no matter how good it is. Ultimately, only the complete picture counts. An organization is only as effective as the degree to which its practices, processes, and structures fit and work with each other. Put another way, an organization may have all the "best" practices, but if those ...