Networked, Scaled, and Agile: A Design Strategy for Complex Organizations

While technology and geopolitical forces change the face of business today, the patterns and challenges of organizing humans to work together across organization, culture, language and time zone boundaries remain. To face these challenges, all organizations need to be agile, networked and scalable.

Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how to shape organizations that will enable people to make faster and better decisions in a more complex world. By outlining the tension between the need for agility/differentiation and scale/integration, the book offers a new way to think about this debate using the models of the Tower (vertical integration) and the Square (horizontal integration). It addresses the role of the leadership team and how the organization design process can build C-suite leaders and successors. Each chapter concludes with a series of reflection questions for leaders as well as a summary of key concepts and tips.

Including case studies from global organizations, Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how organization design can address three of the biggest business challenges organizations face today: how to build a new capability across the entire enterprise; how to make the entire organization more customer-centric; and how to allow for faster innovation.

About the Authors

Amy Kates is Managing Director at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is part of Accenture, and is based in New York, New York. She works with senior executives to assess organizational issues, reshape structures and processes, and build depth of management capability. In addition to her consulting work, she teaches organization design in the Executive MBA program at the DTU School of Business in Denmark and through Cornell University. She is a Resource Partner to the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business at USC and is a member of the i4cp Thought Leadership Consortium. She is an advisory board member for the Organization Design Forum and a board member of the Organization Design Community. She has also been appointed a Visiting Fellow to the government of Singapore for the 2018 - 2020. In 2018, she joined the board of Educate!, a non-profit focused on secondary school curriculum reform in east Africa.

Greg Kesler is Managing Director at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is part of Accenture, and resides in Trumbull, Connecticut. He consults with CEOs and other senior leaders on global organization design and activation, including the development of global executive talent. He has led whole company, global redesign projects for many leading multi-national companies in the consumer-packaged goods, food and beverage, capital equipment, oil and gas, and healthcare sectors. He has developed and implemented succession-planning and executive assessment practices at numerous major companies, partnering with CEOs to assess executive talent. He specializes in designing and implementing global operating models and governance practices in large multi-national organizations.

Michele DiMartino is Partner with Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, which is now a part of Accenture, and resides in St Petersberg, Florida. She has directed organization design projects for mature global companies and younger fast-growth companies, across the retail, hospitality, high-tech, agri-business, life sciences, consumer packaged goods, and finance sectors (e.g., Cargill, PepsiCo, Qurate Group, Kimberly-Clark, Qualcomm, CSL, Alliance Data, E&J Gallo, Intuitive Surgical). She also has deep expertise in human resource transformation and is a guest lecturer at Cornell University and New York University.