Organizational Design: Creating Competitive Advantage

In order to sustain themselves, organizations need to compete for scarce resources both in input and output markets. Because of this organizations need to create some kind of competitive advantage.

In this business and management course, suitable for managers and leaders in midsize to large organizations, you will learn the principles of organizational design and how design elements can be leveraged to gain competitive advantage. We will discuss various organizational structures and how an effective organizational design can help achieve a company’s goals and objectives in a sustainable manner. Since organizations involve collaborative activities, you’ll also learn how to create suitable control systems, decision-making processes and culture and reporting relationships to ensure that the efforts of a diverse set of employees are suitably coordinated to achieve the organizational purpose.

This course will be running over six weeks. Week 1 : Interrelationship between organization structure and strategy Case used – Joy of Running Relationship between organizations and markets Control systems in organizations Case used – Cunningham Motors Week 2: Leveraging specialization in organization design Competitive advantage achieved through different designs Case discussion of Ford Motors Company and General Motors Week 3: Strategic outsourcing Decision making framework for outsourcing Variety versus scale tradeoff Week 4: Different Organization Structures – functional, divisional and Matrix Case discussion of a Consumer Durables Company having a hybrid structure Structural tradeoffs – complexity, formalization and centralization  
Week 5: Mechanistic and Organic designs Case discussion of Acme and Omega Week 6: How to manage structural change Case used – VFM Solutions Putting it all together