Structure in Fives

HENRY MINTZBERG

There is nothing magic about the number five... unless you are structuring an effective organization.

What could be more important to the effective functioning of our organizations—from repair shops to automobile companies, police forces to national governments—than the design of their structures? Yet what do we really know about such design?
Ironically, we know a great deal, but not in a form accessible to those people who must create such designs—managers, staff specialists, and consultants. The vast literature on organizational structuring, much of it based on systematic empirical research, has largely escaped the practitioner for two reasons. First, it is mostly contained in articles and books written in an academic style for other researchers. Those practitioners willing to work through the jargon find that the orientation of such writings is more on what is than on what should be: in other words, on what takes place in organizations rather than on how to design an effective organization. Second, despite the vastness of the literature and its many available insights, what it lacks is synthesis. Practitioners could find these insights in no one place; they virtually had to wade through the entire range of literature to find out what it had to say.
Structure in Fives by Henry Mintzberg is a practical and concise response to these very real needs.

CONTENTS:

A Note to the Reader. Foundations of Organization Design. Designing Individual Positions. Designing the Superstructure. Fleshing Out the Superstructure. Untangling Decentralization. Fitting Design to Situation. Design as Configuration.
The Simple Structure. The Machine Bureaucracy. The Professional Bureaucracy. The Divisionalized Form. The Adhocracy. Beyond Five. Bibliography. Index.