Understanding Organizations...Finally! Structure in Sevens

The iconic Henry Mintzberg provides a crystal-clear map to the seven forces that shape all human organizations, synthesizing 60 years of research on organizational design and theory.

Human beings have been organizing to accomplish work for as long as we’ve existed—so why is organizational behavior still so elusive and mysterious?
 
In this book, one of the greatest scholars in his field reframes his career's work around the seven forces that drive all organizations. Mintzberg identifies them as efficiency, proficiency, consolidation, collaboration, culture, division, and conflict. Each of these forces aligns with one of the seven basic organizational forms: the Personal Enterprise, the Programmed Machine, the Professional Assembly, the Project Pioneer, the Divisional Form, the Community Ship, and the Political Arena. Mintzberg explores how these forms combine and hybridize, and offers a life cycle model to explain how organizations transition between the forms and hybrids.
 
Mintzberg says that organizations are formed by a set of relationships, yet their purpose is only achieved through individual work—making the act of organizing a unique science. This brilliant book not only explains why organizations are the way they are, but shows how we can make our individual organizations function at the highest possible level.

Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, the winner of awards from the most prestigious academic and practitioner institutions in management (Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management, Association of Management Consulting Firms, and others), and the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from around the world. He is the author or coauthor of twenty books, including Managers Not MBAs, Strategy Safari, and The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, and is a founding partner of CoachingOurselves.com.
 

1. Our World of Organizations
Part I: Re-Viewing the Organization
2. The Players and the Parts
3. The Art, Craft, and Science of Organizing
Part II: The Building Blocks of Organizational Design
4. The Mechanisms to Coordinate
5. The Elements of Design
6. Design in Context
Part III: Four Fundamental Forms of Organization
7. The Personal Enterprise
8. The Programmed Machine
9. The Professional Assembly
10. The Project Pioneer
11. The Four together
Part IV: Seven Basic Forces for Organizing
12. A Force for Each Form
13. Three Forces for All the Forms
Part V: Three More Forms
14. The Divisional Form
15. The Community Ship
16. The Political Arena
Part VI: Balancing the Forces across the Forms
17. In Praise of the Anchored Form
18. Hail to the Hybrids
19. Riding the Life Cycle across the Forms
Part VII: Organizing Beyond Sevens
20. Organizations Outward Bound
21. Opening Up Organization Design