Print Price: $34.95

Format:
Paperback
334 pp.
138 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198293750

Publication date:
September 2007

Imprint: OUP UK

The Modern Firm

Organizational Design for Performance and Growth

John Roberts

Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold.

In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner.

The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology.

Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts on business strategy and organization, The Modern Firm provides new insights into the changes going on in business today and will be of interest to academics, students and managers alike.

Readership : Academics, graduate students in business and economics MBAs, consultants, managers, and strategic planners.

Reviews

• Review from previous edition: "At BP we have found John Roberts' ideas and concepts to be powerful, and we have used them in addressing the issues we face. The holistic approach he advocates to organizational design is very much in line with my own thinking. I am pleased that these ideas have been made available in a systematic fashion in this timely book."
  
  --Sir John Browne, Group Chief Executive, BP plc
• "I am aware of no book that does a better job of integrating rigorous economic reasoning with a rich understanding of how firms operate. Economists, sociologists, organization and strategy scholars, as well as practicing managers, can all learn from the insights on strategy and organization contained in this very fine book."
  
  --Joel Podolny, Dean of Yale School of Management
• "This book shows how recent ideas from economics can help us understand and improve the interplay between a firm's strategy and organization. It is a book for people looking for a deeper understanding of the modern firm - and enjoying the experience. As one of the world's foremost experts on economics and management, Roberts writes in an engaging style that makes the new ideas readily accessible to a wider business audience."
  
  --Bengt Holmström, Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, MIT
• "There are plenty of books on management and leadership that explain what leading firms do. This one explains why. The penetrating insights in The Modern Firm can profitably be applied to a wide variety of strategy and organization problems. Roberts, an economist of the first rank, offers us a practical, readable discussion, without mathematical notation. The Modern Firm should be required reading for corporate leaders and their advisers."
  
  --Jonathan Day, Partner, McKinsey & Company
• "...it is interesting, which isn't something you can say about many business books."
  
  --The Times 03/03/05
• "...best business book of the year...deserves to be a classic... Nobody, it can now be said, is fully fit to run a modern firm until they have read The Modern Firm."
  
  --The Economist