Enduring Ideas: Understanding Your Organization

By Virgil Carter

Are you trying to better understand your organization? Are you responsible for innovation and constructive change in your association? Perhaps you’re considering an organizational and career change, and are thinking about what makes organizations successful. If so, a McKinsey Quarterly article may be interesting. “A Watershed in Thinking About Organizations” is an April 2008 McKinsey article that revisits their 7-S Framework, introduced in the 1970s. The interactive article, the first in a series, “reflects on 7-S…introduced…to address the critical role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness.” Readers can click on any of the seven elements in the framework and listen to McKinsey’s description of the element.

The article can be found here:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Enduring_ideas_The_7-S_Framework_2123_abstract

The article goes on to note “While an increasingly complex business environment has rendered some (organizational) models obsolete, others have endured.” McKinsey says the series presents “frameworks that are as relevant today as they were when first created.”

The 7-S framework “maps seven interrelated factors that influence an organization’s ability to change—shared values, skills, staff, strategy, style and systems—and shows how these forces interact”. The framework suggests that achieving progress in any one part of the framework “will be hard to achieve without progress in the others.”