The Modern Firm: Organizational Design For Performance And Growth

Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, routines, processes, and corporate cultures to improve performance and growth prospects. They are adjusting business scope, reorganizing structures, redefining decision-making, revamping motivation and reward mechanisms, outsourcing activities, redesigning information systems, and seeking to alter shared beliefs, values, and norms.

In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will enhance performance and growth. Successful organizations establish patterns of fit among their organizational design elements, competitive strategies, and external environments in a holistic manner.

The Modern Firm provides powerful frameworks for analyzing the relationships between organizational design, strategy, and environment. Written in accessible language and based on rigorous modeling, it includes numerous examples from historical fur trading companies to modern firms like BP and Nokia. The book also discusses why these developments are happening now, citing increased global competition and technological changes.