Going Horizontal


Book Description

Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success. In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and a increased employee retention and productivity—and a better bottom line. These days, more than ever, successful organizations must respond quickly and nimbly to change—they need every employee's best thinking. A horizontal organization creates an environment of true collaboration, respect, and openness. It allows everyone more freedom to express unconventional ideas or to work through issues that are getting in the way of organizational goals. And it's a more human way to organize—after all, we function perfectly well in our day-to day lives without someone telling us what to do. But when an organization decides to go horizontal, it can be overwhelming for both managers and employees. Slade offers a practical, proven, incremental method to help organizations of all kinds and sizes ease in to a non-hierarchical model. She includes techniques for using your organization's purpose to stay focused and aligned, developing shared decision-making, creating a mutual feedback culture, nurturing autonomy, holding co-managed meetings, and maintaining an environment of collective learning. Going Horizontal will help organizations become more adaptive, collaborative and innovative, which is vital in today's highly competitive and constantly-evolving world.




The Horizontal Organization


Book Description

The vertical/functional hierarchy has been the mainstay of business since the industrial revolution. But it has its problems. In fact, the vertical design all but guarantees fragmented tasks, overspecialization, fiefdoms, turf wars, the urge to control from the top--all the negatives that foster organizational paralysis. In The Horizontal Organization, Frank Ostroff provides executives with the first truly viable alternative to the age-old vertical alignment. Indeed, he offers nothing less than the first full view of what the organization of the future looks like and how it works. The concept of horizontal organization has been hailed in Fortune as "a model corporation for the next fifty years" and in a Business Week cover story as "the real thing." But until now, management books have offered only piecemeal accounts of what the organization of the future might look like. Ostroff, a key developer of the concept of the horizontal organization, offers the first workable road map. He describes what the horizontal organization is, what it looks like, why it is important, how it helps improve performance, where it is appropriate, and how to develop it. The book contains real case examples that show how major international corporations (and one federal agency) have used Ostroff's concepts to meet their competitive goals. For instance, we see how Ford Motor Company's Customer Service Division turned to the horizontal organization to meet a highly ambitious goal--to get the customer's car fixed right, on time, the first time, at a competitive price, in convenient locations. We see how a horizontal design radically improved the performance of OSHA (the federal agency that oversees occupational safety), transforming it from a bureaucratic enforcer of regulations to a proactive problem-solver in a concerted effort to improve working conditions and save lives. And we see how Xerox combined both vertical and horizontal designs successfully, a case that underscores when a firm can best use the horizontal organization to achieve their goals. Ostroff also looks at a General Electric plant in North Carolina, Motorola's Space and Systems Technology Group, and the home finance division of Barclays Bank, highlighting how these major corporations have also used the horizontal organization to radically improve productivity. Many successful business books, such as Reengineering the Corporation and Beyond Reengineering, have given managers only a piece of the puzzle. Ostroff gives us the complete picture. The Horizontal Organization offers the first usable roadmap to the twenty-first-century firm. It is a book everyone who desires to radically improve the performance of their organization will want to read.




The Handbook for Quality Management, Second Edition


Book Description

The definitive guide to organizational excellence--completely updated Fully revised for the latest American Society for Quality (ASQ) Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (CMQ/QE) Body of Knowledge, The Handbook for Quality Management: A Complete Guide to Operational Excellence, Second Edition offers in-depth guidance on effectively applying the principles of quality management in today's business environment and delivering superior results. Designed to help you prepare for and pass the ASQ CMQ/QE exam, this authoritative volume also serves as an essential on-the-job reference. Coverage includes: Business-integrated quality systems Organizational structures The quality function Approaches to quality Customer-focused organizations Integrated planning Strategic planning Understanding customer expectations and needs Benchmarking Organizational assessment Process control Quantifying process variation Quality audits Supply chain management Continuous improvement Effective change management Six Sigma methodology, including detailed descriptions of the DMAIC and DMADV approaches Management of human resources Motivation theories and principles Management styles Resource requirements to manage the quality function Over the past 40 years, the quality management discipline has undergone steady evolution from disparate quality assurance efforts to strategic, business-integrated functions. Today's quality manager must be able to plan and implement measurable, cost-effective process-improvement initiatives across the organization. Written by two of the foremost authorities on the subject and fully updated for the latest American Society for Quality (ASQ) Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE) Body of Knowledge, The Handbook for Quality Management, Second Edition provides an operational guide to the proper understanding and application of quality management in the current business environment. It serves as a primary reference source for an organization's quality program and for anyone seeking to pass the CMQ/OE exam, given by the ASQ. The Handbook for Quality Management: A Complete Guide to Operational Excellence, Second Edition: Clearly defines quality management principles and their application within a cross section of industries Integrates the application of Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma, and Lean thinking into the Quality Management discipline Contains detailed methods for planning, including customer needs recognition, benchmarking, and organizational assessments Discusses controls such as statistical process control, audits, and supply chain management Explains the stages of continuous improvement Incorporates classic motivation theory with more current management practices advocated by Joiner, Senge, and Deming, among others Features simulated and past exam questions to help you study for the ASQ CMQ/OE exam with answers that can be found at www.mhprofessional.com/HQM2




Principles of Management


Book Description

Black & white print. Principles of Management is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the introductory course on management. This is a traditional approach to management using the leading, planning, organizing, and controlling approach. Management is a broad business discipline, and the Principles of Management course covers many management areas such as human resource management and strategic management, as well as behavioral areas such as motivation. No one individual can be an expert in all areas of management, so an additional benefit of this text is that specialists in a variety of areas have authored individual chapters.




The Structuring of Organizations


Book Description

Synthesizes the empirical literature on organizationalstructuring to answer the question of how organizations structure themselves --how they resolve needed coordination and division of labor. Organizationalstructuring is defined as the sum total of the ways in which an organizationdivides and coordinates its labor into distinct tasks. Further analysis of theresearch literature is neededin order to builda conceptualframework that will fill in the significant gap left by not connecting adescription of structure to its context: how an organization actuallyfunctions. The results of the synthesis are five basic configurations (the SimpleStructure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, theDivisionalized Form, and the Adhocracy) that serve as the fundamental elementsof structure in an organization. Five basic parts of the contemporaryorganization (the operating core, the strategic apex, the middle line, thetechnostructure, and the support staff), and five theories of how it functions(i.e., as a system characterized by formal authority, regulated flows, informalcommunication, work constellations, and ad hoc decision processes) aretheorized. Organizations function in complex and varying ways, due to differing flows -including flows of authority, work material, information, and decisionprocesses. These flows depend on the age, size, and environment of theorganization; additionally, technology plays a key role because of itsimportance in structuring the operating core. Finally, design parameters aredescribed - based on the above five basic parts and five theories - that areused as a means of coordination and division of labor in designingorganizational structures, in order to establish stable patterns of behavior.(CJC).




CIO


Book Description




Oppose and Propose


Book Description

Where do the tactics, strategies, and lifestyles of today's activists come from? Many ways of doing radical politics pioneered by Movement for a New Society in the 1970s and 1980s have become central to anti-authoritarian social movements: consensus decision making, spokescouncils, communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, and co-operatively owned businesses. Andrew Cornell's important contribution to US political history uses this story to raise crucial questions for activists today. Oppose and Propose is an engaging and accessible study, every page offers new insights. Andrew Cornell's work appears in Letters from Young Activists and The University Against Itself. He helps produce the quarterly anti-capitalist magazine Left Turn.




Fundamentals of Business (black and White)


Book Description

(Black & White version) Fundamentals of Business was created for Virginia Tech's MGT 1104 Foundations of Business through a collaboration between the Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries. This book is freely available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961 It is licensed with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.




Leading Organizations


Book Description

The Second Edition of Leading Organizations offers an expanded focus on the fluid roles of leaders and participants (followers) and their mutual responsibility for organizational leadership. Like the first edition, this text contains chapters on implementing the organization's mission, structure, culture and strategy written by leading scholars in the fieild. New features include: - Strategic leadership - Virtual leadership - Leadership, organizational change, and conflict - Building a culture of leadership




Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice


Book Description

This book explores the interpersonal world of sibling relationships, explaining how these relationships are central to the development of the psyche of the individual, of the group, of society and of the organisation. Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice considers four key areas: sibling relations, sibling trauma, the law of the mother and the horizontal axis. The contributors journey through examples from the psychological, philosophical, organisational, social and cultural realms, giving a new perspective on the psychic world and the importance of sibling relationships as an empowering and therapeutic component for building relationships. While we are used to looking at the individual, the group and at society through the vertical, hierarchical relationship that results from parent-child relationships, this book discusses and reveals the impact of the horizontal axis. Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice will be important reading for psychoanalysts, group analysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and in training.




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