People want to do a good job. But much too often, the organizational environment they work in gets in their way. At a minimum, this wastes people's talents and energies, and puts impossible loads on executives. At the worst, it induces people to perform poorly, work at cross purposes, fight with one another, and burn out.

Meanwhile, organizations are facing tough challenges from their competition and a volatile, complex business environment. If everyone in an organization isn't doing everything possible to assure its success, the organization is doomed to mediocrity or even failure.

This book describes a straightforward approach to building healthy organizations -- ones in which everybody's talents are fully engaged and their independent actions are well orchestrated. It is a handbook for executives who are disappointed with quick fixes, jaded about management fads, and fed up with solving the same problems day after day...for leaders who are tired of fighting alligators and ready to drain the swamp.

How to order :
Click here to learn more about this book and to order it securely online from Amazon.com. When the Amazon.com screen comes up, simply click "add it to your shopping cart" to order.

Decentralization: Fantasies, Failings and Fundamentals
by N. Dean Meyer

  A concise, logical analysis of why companies decentralize service functions (such as information systems of manufacturing), the costs of decentralization, and the alternatives. Many people believe that decentralization is good for service functions such as engineering, manufacturing, sales, communications, procurement, information systems, finance, human resources, law, real estate, and administration. They think decentralization will make staff more customer focused, improve the strategic payoff of the function, and enhance business-unit autonomy.

Sometimes it works. More often than not, results are disappointing. In either case, the costs are extraordinarily high. Quality drops, innovation slows, responsiveness suffers, business synergies disappear, career paths are shattered, and expenses rise by as much as 50 percent.

There must be a better way to make staff perform! This book describes the reasons people decentralize, and why decentralization is so costly. It explains how a central service department can be fixed so that it delivers all the benefits of decentralization without any of the costs.

And to help executives deal with past mistakes, it documents practical strategies for living with decentralization and for consolidating a fragmented function. This concise, logical analysis of decentralization can serve as the basis for fact-based decision making about this often-emotional topic.

How to order :
Click here to learn more about this book and to order it securely online from Amazon.com. When the Amazon.com screen comes up, simply click "add it to your shopping cart" to order.

Structural Cybernetics: An Overview
by N. Dean Meyer

Organizational structure is a science, not a matter of personalities, politics, fads, and intuition. There are twelve fundamental building blocks of structure present in any organization. The way these are combined determines the health and performance of the organization. And the mechanisms of teamwork determine whether or not the organizational design actually works.

Structural Cybernetics is a comprehensive treatment of the issues of organizational design. This brief overview presents the basics of organizational theory, clear definitions of the building blocks of structure, practical principles for designing organization charts, and an approach to high performance teamwork based on a "network" of entrepreneurs.

How to order :
Click here to learn more about this book and to order it securely online from Amazon.com. When the Amazon.com screen comes up, simply click "add it to your shopping cart" to order.

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