Understanding Organizations...Finally!

PART II

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF ORGANIZATION DESIGN

Let’s get back to that cow, introduced in Chapter 2. The parts of this living beast can easily be identified. But unless you are hungry for a steak, or are a veterinarian who has to fix one of these parts, whole cows are more interesting than parts of cows. While we may not design cows, we do design organizations, as well as fix them, and for this we need to understand their basic building blocks.

Here, hence, we shall have to decompose the design of organizations in order to recompose whole organizations. So please bear with me in the three chapters that follow, on the mechanisms of coordination, the elements of design, and the contextual factors that drive these parameters one way or another. ...