The New Five Forces
Porter's Five Forces are worth critiquing but we've got to adopt structures that actually allow organizations to adapt to big shocks.
Economics
Where org design meets incentives, markets, and the economics of how work actually gets done.
29 posts
Five OD Things Nº 11
Krugman on enshittification; a mission-driven reset at Microsoft; how Y2K wasn't a thing because of massive multiplayer cooperation; Medium's reboot story; Figma's S-1
Five Org Design Things N° 8
Turns out it's about learning, all the way down: How basic technologies shift strategy; Microsoft's org structure research; X-Teams; building Service Design capability; democracy at work
Activist Presentations & Corporate Structure
TLDR: Activist investors want lean SBUs, and they don't love that matrix
Five Org Design Things N° 5
Excess management, Big-biz hiring stall, AI for organizing, Issues at Salesforce, and my thoughts on carve-outs 'n' central services.
The Great Managerial Transfer
The coming transfer from hierarchies of individuals to networks of teams, an exploration of executive comp, and a look back to the 1950s.
Disruption is on Decline
I think it's because of org structure and approval processes. Implications for marketing organizations abound.
John Collison on Stripe's Org Design
Three takeaways: the power of small, coherent teams; speed as a quality of life metric; focusing on the value of the marginal team.
Five Org Design Things N° 4
Tesla and vertical integration; hotels and the theory of the firm; Shipt dystopia; Range's newest raise; digital service.
Competitive Intensity, Business Models, and Distributed Authority
The correct answer to a question about the level of distributed authority doesn't just respond to the will of the people, or to some theoretical norm – it has to be in conversation with the market dynamics of the industry and the company's position in that market.
Managing August’s Finances
Consulting is a simple business, with few logistical or financial challenges to master. Even so, we take operations pretttty seriously at August. Probably more seriously than most businesses of our size, but that’s what makes us great. Right? Over the last 18-ish months, we have developed five spreadsheets that
Bonuses At August
Occasionally in the course of running our business, we will create excess profits. Excess? Profits? I thought we were a for-profit business! Turns out you can have too much profit. For example, if you’re not expecting to have a big profit at the end of the year (because a