MIT Sloan Management Review

Corporate Strategy, Leadership and Organizational Studies

 

The Effective Organization: Forces and Forms

By Henry Mintzberg

January 15, 1991

FROM HIS FIRST BOOK, The Nature of Managerial Work, to his latest, Mintzberg on Management, Henry Mintzberg has been a provocative, influential voice in the general management discussion. This article develops his work on organizational structures, refining his theories to better explain how effective organizations manage the contradictory internal forces that can so easily tear them apart. There is no best way, he argues; organizations must build their own structures, using established forms or combining them. But while there is no blueprint for the effective organization, we can be aware of the dangers—when the force for efficiency, for instance, begins to suppress innovation, or when healthy internal competition deteriorates into petty politics. Managing an organization is like building with LEGOs, he writes, and the best structure is the one that balances forces most gracefully. Henry Mintzberg is Bronfman Professor of Management at McGill University. Permission granted by LEGO Overseas A/S, Billund Denmark, to use the copyrighted word LEGO.

Buy article & permissions

WHAT MAKES an organization effective? For a long time we thought we had the answer. Frederick Taylor told us about the “one best way” at the turn of the century, and organizations long pursued this holy grail. First it was Taylor’s time and motion studies, later the participative management of the human relations people, in more recent years the wonders of strategic planning. It was as if every manager had to see the world through the same pair of glasses, although the fashion for lenses changed from time to time.

Then along came the so-called “contingency theorists,” who argued that “it all depends.” Effective organizations designed themselves to match their conditions. They used those time and motion studies for mass production, they used strategic planning under conditions of relative stability, and so forth. Trouble was, all this advice never came together: managers were made to feel like diners at a buffet table, urged to take a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

In a way, these two approaches to organizational effectiveness are reflected in the most popular management writings of today. I like to call them “Peterian” and “Porterian.” Tom Peters and Robert Waterman implore managers to “stick to their knitting” and to design their structures with “simultaneous loose-tight properties,” among other best ways, while Michael Porter insists that they use competitive... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

In This Issue

 

Best Sellers