“Strategy should utilize the five basic principles of organizational design: division of labor, unity of command, authority and responsibility, spans of control, and contingency factors.”
What!? No one designs orgs like this. Orgs are designed around:
A) “Axis of Excellence” (Eg if you want functional excellence in your org - ie the best salesperson to lead sales, the best marketer to lead marketing - then you organize around functions likes Sales, Marketing, Engineeing etc). OR,
B) “Max{Collaborative Output} and Min{Communication Overhead}” needs - Eg if people across functions need to collaborate closely to produce a business result then one create those units accordingly - they could be line of business units ( eg textile: spinning, packaging etc) or geo-based units.
Looking at the framework they use makes me wonder what useless theories are being taught in MBA schools :-)
The most interesting bit in the paper is about messaging. Seems like Napoleon invented HipChat/Slack of his day to make his orgs work more smoothly. That was quite cool!
“Napoleon utilized the existing technology of the Chappe’s semaphore telegraph to improve his message traffic. He maximized its potential by constructing towers across Europe creating a communications web that would cover his expanding empire (Elting, 1988). When messages were too long or not as important to use Chappe’s telegraph, Napoleon relied on the European postal system. He made improvements by creating an express courier service. Messages were carried in a lock box with a logbook that showed the date and time of arrivals and departures of couriers to each post house”