Bridging Organization Design and Performance: 5 Ways to Activate a Global Operation Model

Five practical steps to enhance organization effectiveness on a global scale

Bridging Organization Design and Performance is a handbook for leaders looking to enhance the success of their organizations and themselves. Companies that compete globally require organizational operating models as robust as their strategies. Many companies have created elegant designs and consider their worldwide, matrix organizations sources of competitive advantage. However, the reality is that these complex structures bring many challenges and senior executives are often frustrated by the difficulties of delivering growth in organizations that span numerous brands, products, and geographic regions.

After working closely with over twenty large US and Europe based global companies during the past decade, Gregory Kesler and Amy Kates concluded that the problem is not in the fundamental design of these operating models. The matrix is not going away. The challenge is to effectively and completely activate the organization to deliver the strategy. This book shares the five practical actions that bring complex organizations to life and help companies gain sustainable results from their global operating models.

About the Authors

Amy works with leaders and their teams to assess organizational issues, reshape structures and processes, and build depth of management capability. She is a skilled diagnostician and designer and helps her clients to understand organizational options and their implications, and to make sound decisions.

In addition to her consulting work, she teaches organization design in the Executive MBA program at the Executive School of Business in Denmark, at Ashridge Business School in the U.K., and through Cornell University. Amy is a past editor of the journal People & Strategy. This is Amy’s fourth book on organization design. Amy has her graduate and undergraduate degrees from Cornell University.

Greg consults with corporations in organization design and executive talent management.

He is the coauthor of Leading Organization Design (Jossey-Bass, 2011) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He teaches and speaks on the subject to executive groups around the world.

Greg has led whole-company, global redesign projects and succession planning initiatives at numerous multinational companies. He specializes in designing and implementing global operating models and governance practices in large global companies.

Before beginning his consulting career, Greg held senior human resource management positions in the United States and Europe for three Fortune 200 companies. Greg holds a master’s degree in organization and human relations from the University of Kansas.