Introduction: The executive challenge of designing the organization

In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design. The fundamentals are: what are our goals? What are the basic tasks? Who makes which decisions? What is the structure of communication, and what is the incentive structure? Fenton and Pettigrew (2000, p. 6) state that “a closer inspection of the literature reveals that many of the new forms are not entirely new but reminiscent of earlier typologies, such as Burns and Stalker's (1961) organic and mechanistic forms and Galbraith's preoccupation with lateral relations.” Thus fundamental concepts and principles of organizational design remain very important for the modern organization of today and tomorrow.