About this ebook
But when we look for an alternative, we are faced with a miasma of competing claims for different organising principles. Do we need to be purpose led or profit driven? Focussed or flexible? More centralised or decentralised? Hierarchical or networked? Agile, Lean or driven by scale? And should we all be aiming to become ‘teal’ organisations?
This situation is confusing, and it is perilous. It is also unnatural - in a very fundamental sense - because it demonstrates that we have failed to learn nature’s tricks about how organisations can survive and thrive. In any kind of environment. No matter how turbulent and unpredictable.
The remedy prescribed in this book is not a choice between ‘this’ or ‘that, it is about balance. Or more specifically maintaining a set of dynamic balances that continuously shift to tame the complexity faced, and created, by organisations.
Balance begets calm and poise. Calm and poise beget clarity of thought, decisiveness and agility.
This book paints a picture of what these balances are and how they work. It helps readers to describe and make sense of the mess and muddle of organisational life, to design healthy workplaces and to diagnose and cure diseased ones.
It can do this because the book is not a manifesto of hope or wishful thinking. It brings together esoteric knowledge amassed over decades about how systems actually work (or don’t) in a form that is both accessible and practical.
Amongst other things you will learn:
· What creates organisational complexity and how to go about taming it
· How to achieve economies of scale without incurring diseconomies of scale
· How to promote freedom to act without sacrificing organisational order
· About the universal law of organisation
· About the five structure pillars and
· The six balances essential for organisations to be viable
· How to use describe, diagnose and treat organisational ills and design healthier ones
· How to ‘bake in’ resilience
· How to nurture and exploit the power of self organisation
· How to be both stable and nimble, agile and lean and to exploit and explore
To a curious reader this book is a key to a world of powerful but little understood ideas. For a management practitioner it provides a new perspective on familiar problems and a platform for action. And it helps a leader to grasp the essence of what is and reimagine what could be.
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About the author
Steve Morlidge has 30 years of practical experience in designing and running performance management systems in Unilever, including three years as the lead of a global change project. He is a former chairman of the European Beyond Budgeting Round Table and now works as a public speaker and consultant, drawing on his years of experience at the leading edge of performance management thought and practice.
Steve has previously published Future Read, (John Wiley, 2010), The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting (Matador 2017), The Little Book of Operational Forecasting (Matador 2018) and Present Sense (Matador 2019). He is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK. He also serves as a member of the Beyond Budgeting Institute’s non-executive board and on the editorial board of Foresight, a forecasting practitioner’s journal published by the International Institute of Forecasting to which he regularly contributes. He is also a cofounder of CatchBull, a supplier of forecasting performance management software.
As well as being a qualified accountant, Steve has a PhD from Hull Business School in Yorkshire, UK focusing on the application of systems concepts to the design of complex organizations.
He lives just outside London, with his wife.
