Networked, Scaled, and Agile - by Amy Kates & Greg Kesler & Michele DiMartino (Paperback)

About the Book

Enable your employees to work laterally and make faster, better decisions by designing an organization that can respond to the business challenges of balancing global integration with local relevance and digital transformation across the company.

Book Synopsis

While technology and geopolitical forces change the face of business today, the patterns and challenges of organizing humans to work together across organization, culture, language and time zone boundaries remain. To face these challenges, all organizations need to be agile, networked and scalable.

Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how to shape organizations that will enable people to make faster and better decisions in a more complex world. By outlining the tension between the need for agility/differentiation and scale/integration, the book offers a new way to think about this debate using the models of the Tower (vertical integration) and the Square (horizontal integration). It addresses the role of the leadership team and how the organization design process can build C-suite leaders and successors. Each chapter concludes with a series of reflection questions for leaders as well as a summary of key concepts and tips.

Including case studies from global organizations, Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how organization design can address three of the biggest business challenges organizations face today: how to build a new capability across the entire enterprise; how to make the entire organization more customer-centric; and how to allow for faster innovation.

Review Quotes

"Kates, Kesler and DiMartino build on well-tested theories of human behavior and large-scale systems to show how organization design frameworks apply to the new and challenging realities of today."-- "Charles Snow, Professor Emeritus, Penn State Smeal College of Business"

"An insightful, compelling and pragmatic book which offers thoughtful solutions to the complex organizational challenges faced by businesses today."-- "Andrew Clarke, President, Mars Wrigley"

"As part of our journey to transform VF's brand portfolio for the future, we partnered with the Kates Kesler team to reimagine our business operating model. Their expertise established a strong foundation that has enabled our enterprise functions and brands to work more seamlessly and with greater agility, ultimately improving how we serve our consumers around the world."-- "Steve Rendle, Chairman, President and CEO, VF Corporation"

"Organization design is not just for the big company. The Kates Kesler methodology positioned Zwift for explosive growth. We've been able to scale efficiently and make smart decisions about linking innovation to our core business."-- "Eric Min, Founder and CEO, Zwift"

"The team at Kates Kesler has an innate feel for how sound organizational design acts as the accelerator for sustainable growth. If you are an executive who is asked to lead a transformation or find a path for growth in these dynamic times, this book will prove invaluable."-- "Andre Martin, Vice President PeopleDev, Google"

"This book provides a timely and insightful lens for thoughtful discourse on designing organizations in our fast-changing landscape. Its focus on networks, scale and agility deeply resonate with our efforts in the Singapore Public Service to design the future of work, workplace and workforce in our agencies."-- "Ong Toon Hui, Dean and CEO, Civil Service College, Singapore"

"This book shows you how to design an organization to be both big and fast. The Kates Kesler methodology guided W.L. Gore in making key choices to evolve our structure and still maintain the essence of our unique culture."-- "Mary Tilley, Enterprise Business Transformation Leader, W.L. Gore and Associates, Inc."

"This is the perfect book for leaders who need to align their organization with the strategy, and who are searching for a comprehensive framework. Kates, Kesler and DiMartino discuss the design of the overall operating model, horizontal linkages as well as the vertical layers and roles in complex organizations. They also provide numerous practical examples of how we can design organization to achieve both agility and efficiency."-- "Nicolay Worren, Associate Professor, School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Co-founder of Reconfig, Member of curatorial board, European Organization Design Forum"

About the Author

Amy Kates, Greg Kesler, and Michele DiMartino are organization design practitioners that consult to senior executives in companies around the world and live in New York, NY, Turnbull, CT and St. Petersburg, FL respectively. They are Managing Directors at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is part of Accenture. Kates Kesler is recognized as one of the leading organization design firms and their methodology has become the global standard. The firm has been named by Forbes as one of the best consulting firms annually since 2016.