Organization redesign exercises consume enormous time, resources and energy, and yet they so often get stuck midway or fail to deliver the aspired benefits. This ground-breaking book offers a comprehensive guide, enabling executives and their teams to have nuanced and in-depth discussions about substantive design choices. Once these choices are clear, the teams can confidently initiate the change process. The book brings together the building blocks of organization design thinking into a logical flow. It offers a high-quality framework, with each building block broken down into specific design questions. For each of the five categories of design variables – architecture, processes, culture, people and technology – the book enables executives to discover and weigh up a variety of situation-specific design alternatives. The book steers clear of academic abstractions, simplistic formulaic solutions, flavor-of-the-year debates and misleading anecdotes from today’s superstar firms. It is written for smart executives at mainstream companies who realize that organization design choices are contextual and influenced by their company’s specific history. The book presents a pragmatic framework that guides managers in search of a conclusive and efficient organization design process. It is relevant to C-suite executives and directors, as well as senior and middle managers, internal project leaders and organization design consultants.

Organization redesign exercises consume enormous time, resources and energy, and yet they so often get stuck midway or fail to deliver the aspired benefits. This ground-breaking book offers a comprehensive guide, enabling executives and their teams to have nuanced and in-depth discussions about substantive design choices. Once these choices are clear, the teams can confidently initiate the change process. The book brings together the building blocks of organization design thinking into a logical flow. It offers a high-quality framework, with each building block broken down into specific design questions. For each of the five categories of design variables – architecture, processes, culture, people and technology – the book enables executives to discover and weigh up a variety of situation-specific design alternatives. The book steers clear of academic abstractions, simplistic formulaic solutions, flavor-of-the-year debates and misleading anecdotes from today’s superstar firms. It is written for smart executives at mainstream companies who realize that organization design choices are contextual and influenced by their company’s specific history. The book presents a pragmatic framework that guides managers in search of a conclusive and efficient organization design process. It is relevant to C-suite executives and directors, as well as senior and middle managers, internal project leaders and organization design consultants.

Fad-Free Strategy provides a ground-breaking approach to making better business strategy decisions: more efficient, open to out-of-the-box opportunities and evidence-based. Most strategy books focus on Grand Strategy, the process that leads to high-level recommendations or, more accurately, hypotheses about where and how to compete. While this book briefly covers critical Grand Strategy practices, it deep dives into Operational Strategy, the process of validation, adaptation and possible rejection of those hypotheses. Operational Strategy is based on an in-depth understanding of customer preferences and anticipating the choices they make. Those choices rather than managers' ambitions determine whether a strategy will generate the aspired financial results. The book explains, by means of detailed real-world cases across industries, how to generate validated solutions to any strategic problem such as: how to enter successfully into new markets, either as an innovator or as a latecomer? How to defend one's position against aggressive new entrants? Or how to sustain margins when price is the only thing customers seem to care about? This remarkable book contains expert advice from accomplished strategic advisors and thought leaders Daniel Deneffe and Herman Vantrappen. Fad Free Strategy will be a useful tool for smart business executives at mainstream companies who are disappointed with strategy fads and simplistic solutions based on cherry-picked, anecdotal evidence from today's hero companies. It will also appeal to economics faculty members teaching graduate courses in business strategy who are looking for an economics-based strategy textbook that is both rigorous and comprehensive. The book's core ideas have been taught successfully in continuing and executive education programs at Harvard University and Hult International Business School.