Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

By Reed Deshler, Kreig Smith and Alyson Von Feldt

Mastering the Cube skillfully lays out proven organization design principles. Comparing today’s complex organizations to a Rubik’s Cube, the authors explain how focusing improvement efforts on just one or two facets of the organization is akin to concentrating on just one side of the cube. Doing so is bound to affect—and more likely jumble—the other areas needed to generate a healthy and sustainable organization. They advocate stepping back and taking a systems-wide, comprehensive view of change and bringing all elements into alignment with strategy. They describe eight common beliefs and missteps that cause leaders to stumble, and they offer eight building blocks to effectively orchestrate complex organizational change.

Written for both business leaders and their change partners in human resources, organization effectiveness, organization design, strategy, information technology, and process or continuous improvement (e.g., Lean Six Sigma), the book offers practical wisdom to help readers develop a shared perspective on organization design and achieve positive business results. It also outlines key principles and concepts for leading effective organization alignment—and moving your organization into a productive, rewarding future.

Whether the transformation before you involves restructuring, consolidations, or mergers and acquisitions, this resource provides the guidance you’ll need to become skilled in the important, real work of strategic organizational alignment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990385455

Book preview

challenges?

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO APPROACH STRUCTURAL CHANGE

When Ernest Jimenez assumed the leadership role for the growth markets of an international security service and systems provider, he had already led operational and financial turnarounds all over the world as well as the integration of significant acquisitions. His imperative was to more than triple one of the firm’s core businesses in Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, and India in five years. Jimenez was no neophyte, but this challenge was his biggest yet.

In one Middle Eastern market, Jimenez could see a number of operational problems, but before launching reforms, he took steps to clarify the strategy. Though the residential market for subscription security services was nearly saturated in this country, the commercial market was underplayed. His team set a 90 percent growth target over three years, the majority of which was to be generated through the commercial sector. But company leaders in the country had already been trying to penetrate the commercial market; they had eagerly launched the effort and created new commercial sales jobs to really go after commercial customers. Results had not delivered the kind of growth Jimenez’s team was