Learnings from this week's readings and an article

Before going through this week's readings, my first impression was that it was all about Galbraith's star model as the panacea for the ailment of organizational design. I'm glad that I was wrong.

I've been a part of and have led teams in different circumstances (informal teams, academic teams, cross-functional work teams in different industries, and given this experience, I thought I was (or was my perceived managerial style) closer to Fiedler's contingency approach, meaning that for me, organizations must be designed according to the circumstances, environment and other conditions, and that there is no "correct or perfect" organization model.

A second and more thorough reading of Worley & Lawler (2006) and Galbraith's (2002) chapters removed some my skepticism when I understood that the whole point of the Star Model is to provided structured flexibility in organizational design. Then the question hit me: What about the organizations that are already built?

And so I researched a little further and found this very nice article from the McKinsey Quarterly

Preparing your organization for growth - McKinsey Quarterly -

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Preparing_your_organization_for_growth_2809

I wish to share this article with you because it complements what we have read by providing an answer the question above, and in my humble opinion, integrates part of the Systems Theory approach to organizational design by showing how organizational design evolves by correcting it's own flaws through experience over time.

References

Galbraith, J. (2002) Designing Organizations: An Executive Guide to Strategy, Structure and Process, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA. pp. 73-90.

Worley, C. & Lawler, E. (2006). Designing organizations that are built for change, MIT Sloan Management Review, 48(1), pp. 18-23.