Designing the Smart Organization


Book Description

Filling a gap in the literature, this book offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to learning for corporate strategic development, linking the domains of strategy, organizational design, and learning. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with detailed case studies from leading global organizations, including Siemens, ABB, BASF, the US Army, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EADS, Novartis, and more. These studies reveal how large-scale corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, enhance leadership culture, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom line results. For any company that wants to compete in the 21st century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.




The Smart Organization


Book Description

Why do some firms deliver a stream of successful products and services while others continually make poor R&D decisions? According to the Mathesons, successful firms have internalized the nine interlocking principles of smart organizations -- the building blocks of a corporate culture that emphasize making the right strategic decisions at the right times while aligning organizational practices to support these decisions and sustain their results. Among the nine principles are embracing uncertainty; open information flow; system thinking; and developing a value creation culture. Once in place, these values enable companies to make appropriate choices about their R&D planning, portfolio management, and project and business strategies. The authors stress the importance of evaluating trade-offs, creating alternatives, balancing risk and return, and getting buy-in across functional areas to ensure that decisions will be viable from both technical and management perspectives. "If more companies were to act like this, there might be less demand for off-the-peg strategies from consultants." -- The Economist, July 11, 1998.




Leading Organization Design


Book Description

Praise for Leading Organization Design "Sheds light on the challenges of organization design in a complex enterprise and more importantly provides an insightful and practical roadmap for business decisions." Randy MacDonald, SVP, human resources, IBM "Designing organizations for performance can be a daunting task. Kesler and Kates have done an admirable job distilling the inherent complexity of the design process into manageable parts that can yield tangible results. Leading Organization Design provides an essential hands-on roadmap for any business leader who wants to master this topic." Robert Simons, Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School "Kesler and Kates have encapsulated their wealth of knowledge and practical experience into an updated model on organizational design that will become a new primer on the subject." Neville Isdell, retired chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company "In today's world of global business, organizational design is a critical piece of long-term success. Kesler and Kates have captured multiple approaches to optimize global opportunities, while highlighting some of the keys to managing through organizational transition. A great read for today's global business leaders." Charles Denson, president, Nike Brand "Leading Organization Design has some unique features that make it valuable. It is one of the few and certainly only recent books to take us through an explicit process to design modern organizations. This is accomplished with the five-milestone process. The process is not a simple cookbook. Indeed, the authors have achieved a balance between process and content. In so doing, Kesler and Kates show us what to do as well as how to do it." Jay Galbraith, from the Foreword




Smart Organizations and Smart Artifacts


Book Description

This book offers a multidisciplinary strategy for finding new and more effective human-computer interaction approaches, in particular from a socio-technical perspective, that facilitate the exploration and exploitation of benefits that information technologies (IT) offer organizations. Though the relationship between IT and organizations is certainly very strong, it is also one of the greatest obstacles to securing benefits from their interaction. The participation of organizational users in the planning and design stages of IT interfaces is the main area of human-computer interaction, where a wealth of contributions are positively enriching both the academic and management discussions. Thus, a new approach for managing this relationship is needed, one in which the different stakeholders are suitably taken into account. Moreover, the outstanding success of the 2.0 phenomenon offers an example of a relevant platform where human-computer interaction has been widely developed and exploited. Consequently, this will influence and already is influencing – the way IT and users interact with each other. The book is based on a selection of the best papers – original, double blind peer-reviewed contributions – from the annual conference of the Italian chapter of the AIS, held in Milan, Italy in December 2013.




Designed for Digital


Book Description

One of Forbes's Top Ten Technology Books of the Year How to redesign ‘big, old’ companies for digital success—featuring a survey of 300+ business leaders and 30+ global organizations, including Amazon, Uber, LEGO, Toyota North America, Philips, and USAA. Most established companies have deployed such digital technologies as the cloud, mobile apps, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. But few established companies are designed for digital. This book offers an essential guide for retooling organizations for digital success through 5 key building blocks: • Shared Customer Insights • Operational Backbone • Digital Platform • Accountability Framework • External Developer Platform In the digital economy, rapid pace of change in technology capabilities and customer desires means that business strategy must be fluid. As a result, business design has become a critical management responsibility. Effective business design enables a company to quickly pivot in response to new competitive threats and opportunities. Most leaders today, however, rely on organizational structure to implement strategy, unaware that structure inhibits, rather than enables, agility. In companies that are designed for digital, people, processes, data, and technology are synchronized to identify and deliver innovative customer solutions—and redefine strategy. Digital design, not strategy, is what separates winners from losers in the digital economy. Designed for Digital offers practical advice on digital transformation, with examples that include Amazon, BNY Mellon, DBS Bank, LEGO, Philips, Schneider Electric, USAA, and many other global organizations. Drawing on 5 years of research and in-depth case studies, the book is an essential guide for companies that want to disrupt rather than be disrupted in the new digital landscape.




Integration of ICT in Smart Organizations


Book Description

"The book covers the state-of-the-art concepts and methodologies of smart organization development featuring information and communication technologies"--Provided by publisher.




Smart Business


Book Description

Smart Business is the definitive primer for understanding why companies behave as they do, what the basics of sound business practice are and where the stakeholders fit in. There are a handful of fairly simple but key drivers behind the way businesses operate and James Leibert explains them. Smart Business will enable readers to fast track their business skills. Smart books are essential primers to the key issues facing business people. They are practical and action-oriented, providing instant knowledge for ambitious and hungry professionals who want to make a lasting impression throughout their career. Smart books are designed to give killer approaches to key business subjects, and deliver sound principles in a style that is both informative and has attitude. They are the prefect resource for time-starved, information-hungry business people everywhere!




Design a Better Business


Book Description

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you’ve likely never seen before, guiding readers (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world. This book also features over 50 case studies and real life examples from large corporations such as ING Bank, Audi, Autodesk, and Toyota Financial Services, to small startups, incubators, and social impact organizations, providing a behind the scenes look at the best practices and pitfalls to avoid. Also included are personal insights from thought leaders such as Steve Blank on innovation, Alex Osterwalder on business models, Nancy Duarte on storytelling, and Rob Fitzpatrick on questioning, among others.




Designing Knowledge Organizations


Book Description

A pedagogical approach to the principles and architecture of knowledge management in organizations This textbook is based on a graduate course taught at Stevens Institute of Technology. It focuses on the design and management of today's complex K organizations. A K organization is any company that generates and applies knowledge. The text takes existing ideas from organizational design and knowledge management to enhance and elevate each through harmonization with concepts from other disciplines. The authors—noted experts in the field—concentrate on both micro- and macro design and their interrelationships at individual, group, work, and organizational levels. A key feature of the textbook is an incisive discussion of the cultural, practice, and social aspects of knowledge management. The text explores the processes, tools, and infrastructures by which an organization can continuously improve, maintain, and exploit all elements of its knowledge base that are most relevant to achieve its strategic goals. The book seamlessly intertwines the disciplines of organizational design and knowledge management and offers extensive discussions, illustrative examples, student exercises, and visualizations. The following major topics are addressed: Knowledge management, intellectual capital, and knowledge systems Organizational design, behavior, and architecture Organizational strategy, change, and development Leadership and innovation Organizational culture and learning Social networking, communications, and collaboration Strategic human resources; e.g., hiring K workers and performance reviews Knowledge science, thinking, and creativity Philosophy of knowledge and information Information, knowledge, social, strategy, and contract continuums Information management and intelligent systems; e.g., business intelligence, big data, and cognitive systems Designing Knowledge Organizations takes an interdisciplinary and original approach to assess and synthesize the disciplines of knowledge management and organizational design, drawing upon conceptual underpinnings and practical experiences in these and related areas.




The Smart Nonprofit


Book Description

A pragmatic framework for nonprofit digital transformation that embraces the human-centered nature of your organization The Smart Nonprofit turns the page on an era of frantic busyness and scarcity mindsets to one in which nonprofit organizations have the time to think and plan — and even dream. The Smart Nonprofit offers a roadmap for the once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake work and accelerate positive social change. It comes from understanding how to use smart tech strategically, ethically and well. Smart tech does rote tasks like filling out expense reports and identifying prospective donors. However, it is also beginning to do very human things like screening applicants for jobs and social services, while paying forward historic biases. Beth Kanter and Allison Fine elegantly outline the ways smart nonprofits must stay human-centered and root out embedded bias in order to success at the compassionate and creative work that only humans can and should do.




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