Death of The Org Chart: Rise of the Organizational Graph

Book Synopsis: Death of the Org Chart is a real world How To Book. We will teach you how to think about your organizational design, structure and your org chart through a different lens, from a modern perspective. You will learn how to unravel and organize the structural complexities inherent in your modern day organization. It is for people who are not happy with the status quo, who want to become organizational design experts.

The complexity of modern organizations can no longer be captured in your 20th century Org Chart, it requires a new thinking approach and new technology to capture this thinking.

Frustrated CEO's are asking: Who is doing what and why? Frustrated Individual Contributors are asking: What am I doing and why? Death of the Org Chart gives you the path to fully address the above two questions.

Excerpt:

Rumor has it that when business guru Peter Drucker was on his deathbed, someone asked him, what is the most important question in business? He supposedly replied, "Who is doing what?" Such a simple question and yet it has never been more difficult to answer. Obviously this query implies others. Even in Drucker's time, it could have been expanded to: "Who is doing what, with whom, for whom, how, and why?" These days, we must also add, "...using what software, on what platforms, as part of what teams, through what communication channels, after which meetings..." ad infinitum.

The old question, like the classic Organizational Chart, gets to something vital, but in a way that misses the ever more complicated reality of 21st century organizations. Not only has "Who is doing what?" turned into an incredibly complex question, "What am I doing and why?" has become a painfully difficult one for workers to answer.

My goal here is to provide an approach and a set of tools that allow both leaders and Individual Contributors (ICs) to answer these extended Drucker questions honestly and completely. My aim is fourfold:

1. To help people understand organizational complexity - the messy complicated reality, not the neat simplicity portrayed in Org Charts.
2. To provide a clear foundation for working within this complexity by supplementing your thinking with a 21st century Organizational Cognizance Model.
3. Introduce a software approach to augment your 2-D Org Chart with a dynamic, interactive 3-D Organizational Graph that allows one to capture and visualize the complex.
4. Finally, to provide thinking tools and facilitation examples that help organizations get buy-in, build clarity, transparency, and, ultimately, "Organizational Cognizance" into their companies.

What is Organizational Cognizance? As anyone familiar with the word "cognizance" might guess, it has lots to do with awareness and knowledge...

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