Session 18

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE - continued

THE ORGANIZATION AS A SYSTEM OF CONSTITUENT PARTS

Ask yourself why a talk on design relates to a topic on organizational structure

Who is Donald Norman?

BUT MINTZBERG IS SOMETHING WE NEED TO READ TO TALK ABOUT IT TODAY

Organizational structuring, of course, focuses on the division of labor of an organizational mission into a number of distinct tasks, and then the coordination of all of these tasks to accomplish that mission in a unified way. The literature suggests that this coordination can be effected in at least five basic ways ...

Mintzberg, H. (1980). Structure in 5's: A Synthesis of the Research on Organization Design. Management Science, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Mar., 1980), 322-341. Focus on pages 322 to the first half of 327

YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ THESE UNLESS YOU WISH TO, BUT WE MIGHT TOUCH UPON THEM IN CONVERSATION

In an ideal world, rational decision making would require a complete search of available alternatives, reliable information about their consequences, and consistent preferences to evaluate these outcomes. In the real world, such demands on information gathering and processing are unrealistic. Instead of a comprehensive, objective rationality, Herbert Simon suggested that decision making in organizations is constrained by the principle of bounded rationality ...

Choo, C. W. (2006). The knowing organization: How organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge, and make decisions. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1, "The Knowing Organization: A Holistic View of How Organizations Use Information." 1-28

THINGS WE'LL TALK ABOUT

• we'll review Mintzberg's five basic parts of an organization
• how can we apply this to our personal experiences within organizations?
• can we place ourselves in this model?

SOMETHING TO TAKE AWAY

The Traveling Wilburys

The whole experience was some of the best days of my life, really, and I think it probably was for us all ... The thing I guess would be hardest for people to understand is what good friends we were. It really had very little to do with combining a bunch of famous people. It was a bunch of friends that just happened to be really good at making music.
Tom Petty in The True History of the Traveling Wilburys