Insights

By: Neil Rosario Organizations sure do love to talk about culture as if it’s a spontaneous story, a product of personalities, values, energy, and goodwill. We imagine culture forming organically, like a campfire that naturally gathers people or a great story that seems effortless, even though we rarely see the work behind it. We often think culture just pops up because people get along and everything clicks, like it all comes together with a quick ta-da , but there’s always s

When I was a kid, my father liked to fix things instead of replacing them. A broken radio, a flickering lamp, a door that wouldn’t shut - he would pull out his toolkit, sit cross-legged on the floor, and quietly figure it out.   “Everything can work again,” he used to say, “if you understand how it’s built.”   That mindset stuck with me. In many ways, every organization is like that. It is built to work, until the environment around it changes . Then, suddenly, what once ran

The phrase "culture eats strategy for breakfast" is often attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker, and it suggests that an organization's culture is more powerful than its strategy in determining its success or failure. However, the idea can also be applied to organizational structure. An organization's culture can have a greater influence on how the organization operates than its formal structure. This means that, even if an organization has a well-designed structure

The ugly secret, not so secret truth about designing organizational structures is that many organizational design/redesign efforts fail. Most do so because there is a lack of understanding of what the organization truly needs and what motivates people to do their best work. In other words, most organizational redesign efforts are embarked on with little effort to holistically understand the existing conditions, the vision for the organization and what truly is keeping the peo