Understanding Organizations--Finally!

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The iconic Henry Mintzberg provides a crystal-clear map to the seven forces that shape all human organizations, synthesizing sixty 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 achieved only 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 it also shows how we can make our individual organizations function at the highest possible level.