Organizational restructuring

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each...

Leaders, don't overlook your employees' emotional journey.

Many cling to the idea that reducing staff is the fastest, easiest way to cut costs. But there are smarter, more humane approaches.

Not so long ago, companies were reinvented by teams. Communities of practice may reinvent them yet again—if managers learn to cultivate these fertile organizational forms without destroying them.

Morning Star, a leading food processor, demonstrates how to create an organization that combines managerial discipline and market-centric flexibility—without bosses, titles, or promotions.

Today layoffs have become companies' default response to the challenges created by advances in technology and global competition. Yet research shows that...

Management practices that work well in one phase may bring on a crisis in another.

The distinctions among followers are every bit as consequential as those among leaders—and have critical implications for how managers should manage.

Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things—knowledge, relationships, and motivation that distant rivals cannot match.

While management skills can improve service systems, a manager is better off if he or she first has a clear understanding of the operating characteristics that set one service system apart from another. This author offers one view of services, which, if followed, results in a “rational approach to the rationalization” of services. His view, […]

Beneath the general principles, attitudes, and ideals of “human relations” lie the actual tactics and day-to-day techniques by which executives achieve, maintain, and exercise power. In the current enthusiasm for “democratizing” business procedures, these hard, practical devices tend to be overlooked. Yet they exist just the same—and, in many ways, do not depart substantially from […]

Organizations have to change to stay alive. That’s a given. But change doesn’t always have to create anguish. Sometimes change is more effective when it hurts less. That’s where a new approach to change—dynamic stability—comes in. Here’s how it works.

What do IBM, Texas Instruments, Owens Corning, and Duke Power have in common? They’re all redesigning their organizations around their core processes—and reaping enormous benefits as a result.

Big companies formerly took a reputational hit when they laid off massive numbers of workers. But according to E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew Kraatz, of the University of Illinois, U.S. business culture norms gradually changed from 1985 to 1994 as new ideas about boosting shareholder value took hold in executive suites and boardrooms. At the […]

Harry Denton, the CEO in this fictional case study, has been caught off guard. As the head of Delarks, a venerable department-store chain in the Midwest,...

Continuous improvement at Toyota Motor Company is now a business legend. For three decades, Toyota enlisted its employees in a relentless drive to find faster, more efficient methods to develop and make low-cost, defect-free cars. The results were stupendous. Toyota became the benchmark in the automobile industry for quality and low cost. The same, however, […]

The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider […]

Even the best-designed systems can’t overcome faulty relationships.

Five strategies to help you manage your stress.

In appraising performance, designing pay systems, and in organizing and planning work, managers make assessments about the size and importance of jobs. Whether the assessments are accurate deeply affects how well the organization runs. But what do we mean when we say that one job is bigger than another? Bigger in what sense? One way […]