Effective and Efficient Organisations?


Book Description

This book develops a conceptual framework for the relationship between organisation and output, and applies it to the analysis of German and British export support services. These findings help to explain why one organisation may be different from another, but equally effective and efficient, and why no panacea for effective and efficient organisation has been found. They also suggest angles from which existing organisations and blueprints of ‘better’ organisations can be examined.




The Effective Executive


Book Description

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to 'get the right things done'. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive. He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.




The Great Mental Models, Volume 1


Book Description

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.




Introduction to Business


Book Description

Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.




Organizational Effectiveness


Book Description

Organizational Effectiveness: A Comparison of Multiple Models directly addresses the issues of non-integration and non-comparability. This book not only provides well thought out approaches to effectiveness as a construct, but also practical suggestions for improving effectiveness in organizations. A set of integrating questions that raise theoretical, conceptual, empirical, research, practical, and managerial issues are also included. This text likewise compares and contrasts theoretical and philosophical roots of a particular perspective with other perspectives. This publication is intended for scholars and researchers seeking to understand and measure organizational effectiveness, as well as practitioners who are faced with the problem of managing and improving their own organization's effectiveness.




Teaming


Book Description

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming. Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure. Presents a clear explanation of practical management concepts for increasing learning capability for business results Introduces a framework that clarifies how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work Explains how Collaborative Learning works, and gives tips for how to do it well Includes case-study research on Intermountain healthcare, Prudential, GM, Toyota, IDEO, the IRS, and both Cincinnati and Minneapolis Children's Hospitals, among others Based on years of research, this book shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn.




Designing Effective Organizations


Book Description

'Goold and Campbell, leading thinkers on corporate-level strategy, have turned their attention to corporate-level organization design. They bring a rigor to this topic that will help managers wrestling with multiple reporting dimensions, decentralization and cross-unit co-ordination.' Professor Gary Hamel, London Business School. Author of Competing for the Future and Leading the Revolution. 'Campbell and Goold are renowned for discovering entirely new and useful dimensions to seemingly familiar business issues. This book is another shining example. It allows executives to replace politics and personality as the rationales for an organizational design with clear, effective logic and experience.' Thomas H. Davenport, Director, Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. Author of Process Innovation and Working Knowledge. 'A "must read" for managers and consultants. Redesigning the organization is the most powerful and fastest means for aligning decisions and behavior with strategic objectives. Goold and Campbell provide the best and most comprehensive framework for developing and testing the validity of an organizational structure I have seen in recent years. Based on years of research and experience they offer clear principles and a process to guide managers in the many design decisions and trade-offs involved in developing a more effective organization.' Professor Michael Beer, Harvard Business School. Author of The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal. 'Books on organization design tend to fall into one of two categories: those that provide interesting concepts but not help on how to implement them and those that are full of check lists on implementation, based on sterile and over-simplified ideas. Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell have written perhaps the finest example of an exception I have ever seen - a very practical book, with detailed guidelines on implementation, yet based on a rich and sophisticated understanding of the real challenges of organization design. It will be of immense use to all careful readers.' Professor Sumantra Ghoshal, London Business School. Author of The Individualized Corporation and Managing Across Borders. 'As companies search for all sources of competitive advantage, many are discovering that the ability to organize and execute complex strategies is an important one. Campbell and Goold have again provided us with a good process through which leaders can give organizing its deserved focus.' Professor Jay Galbraith, author of Designing the Global Corporation. 'Campbell and Goold bring much needed clarity and precision to the language of organizational design and show how this can help managers avoid the misunderstandings and differing interpretations that frequently undermine new organization structures.' Paul Coombes, Director, Organization Practice Area, McKinsey & Company. 'Organization change is close to the top of many companies' agendas. Goold and Campbell's book equips you with ideas and frameworks to take on the journey. The real-world examples help make it both pragmatic and readable.' Steve Russell, Chief Executive, The Boots Company plc. 'An impressive work. The taxonomy of organizational units and organigram symbols will be especially useful to managers working on structures.' Philip Sadler, Patron, The Centre for Tomorrow's Company. Author of The Seamless Organization. 'Incredibly relevant in helping to pull together a complicated structure based around the dimensions of channels, products, customers and geography - immensely clear and valuable.' David Roberts, Chief Executive, Personal Financial Services, Barclays plc. 'A welcome breakthrough in designing more effective corporate organization structures. The nine design tests of Goold and Campbell are a valuable addition to an otherwise sparse toolkit.' Jim Haymaker, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Cargill Inc. ...




Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Skills in Europe


Book Description

The labour markets and European societies as a whole are subject to constant change. One way to face these challenges is the application of “entrepreneurial skills” like self-motivation, time management etc. The authors give examples of entrepreneurship in the fields of digitalization, social innovation, and eco-innovation and present special groups of entrepreneurs (e.g. migrants) and their entrepreneurial spirit. Thus, the readers get insight in how an innovative and competitive Europe can look like.




Time, Talent, Energy


Book Description

Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag--the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.




Education Contested


Book Description

This text discusses the relationship between state, market, civil society and education, examining such topics as: development in education inspectorates; the way in which universities are stimulated to support themselves financially; and the way education prepares students for citizenship.