Guidelines for Organizational Design

“Managing a successful business (nonprofit or for-profit) — or building up the health of an already established business — requires healthy, ongoing leadership and management, planning, product and service development, marketing and financial management. To carry out these practices in a healthy manner, it’s important to first understand the basic ‘territory’ in which these practices are carried out.

These practices are all ’systems’ that occur within the larger system of the organization. This is not academic talk — this is a highly practical point to understand. To truly understand and be effective at these practices, it helps greatly if leaders, managers and employees have some basic understanding of the overall ’system’ of the business, its common traits, dimensions, ‘personalities’ and life cycles. Too often, this basic nature is not understood. Instead, people tend to focus only on the day-to-day events and when problems occur, they don’t see the “larger picture” in order to resolve these problems effectively.”