Tomorrows Organization: Crafting Winning Capabilities in a Dynamic World

In the face of mounting global competition and accelerated changes in technology, organizations are scrambling to develop business strategies, structures, and practices that will simultaneously keep them flexible and profitable. While many companies continue to pursue competitive advantage via the latest management fad, new research indicates that organizational design is now the real key to future success.

Based on eighteen years of in–depth research conducted with Fortune 1000 companies by the Center for Effective Organizations, Tomorrow′s Organization is the first book to offer specific hands–on solutions and practical guidelines for creating organizations that can compete successfully in the twenty–first century. This follow–up to the highly acclaimed Organizing for the Future examines the challenges faced by companies as they reorganize to build more flexible and responsive organizations.

From issues of strategy and structure to leadership and capability development, the authors combine their vast research and consulting experience to offer the latest thinking and emerging practices today′s most successful companies have incorporated to achieve strategic market advantage. And they outlines the flatter, more flexible and dynamic designs these companies have instituted.

Tomorrow′s Organization describes how to design for the new competitive environment––including customer product structures, design issues in networked organizations, and the structuring of global organizations. The contributors reveal which current practices are most likely to prove of lasting value and offer new ways to manage employees through competency–based pay, the new learning contract, and new approaches to executive development. They also provide guidelines for implementing technology as a critical underpinning of new organizational forms.

In an environment characterized by intense and dynamic competition, Tomorrow′s Organization offers sound solutions to the challenges companies are facing in today′s turbulent market place.

Introduction: The Challenge of Challenge: Organizing for Competitive Advantage.

Part One: Designing Competitive Organizations.

1. Corporate Boards: Developing Effectiveness at the Top.

2. Linking Customers and Products: Organizing for Product and Customer Focus.

3. Designing the Networked Organization: Leveraging Size and Competencies.

4. Structuring Global Organizations.

Part Two: Enabling Competitive Performance.

5. Organizing for Competencies and Capabilities: Bridging from Strategy to Effectiveness.

6. The Changing Nature of Work: Managing the Impact of Information Technology.

7. Employee Involvement, Reengineering, and TQM: Focusing on Capability Development.

Part Three: Managing People in the Competitive Organization.

8. The New Human Resources Management: Creating the Strategic Business Partnership.

9. The New Learning Partnership: Sharing Responsibility for Building Competence.

10. Executive Education: A Critical Lever for Organizational Change.

11. Strategic Pay System Design.

Part Four: Transforming the Organization.

12. Teams and Technology: Extending the Power of Collaboration.

13. Accelerating Organizational Learning During Transition.

14. Catalizing Organizational Learning During Transition.

SUSAN ALBERS MOHRMAN is a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) at the University of Southern California. She has written numerous articles for professional journals and is the coauthor of nine books, including Designing Team–Based Organizations (1995) and Creating High Performance Organizations (1995), both published by Jossey–Bass.

JAY R. GALBRAITH is professor of management at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently on leave from the University of Southern California, where he holds joint appointments as professor of management and organization in the Graduate School of Business and senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations.

EDWARD E. LAWLER III is founding director of the University of Southern California′s Center for Effective Organizations, where he is professor of management and organization in the Marshall School of Business. He is the author of twenty–seven books, including From the Ground Up (1996) and Strategic Pay (1990), both from Jossey–Bass.