Works
- Strategies and Styles: The Role of the Centre in Managing Diversified Corporations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford and New York (x and 374 pages), 1987
- Corporate-Level Strategy: Creating Value in the Multibusiness Company, Wiley, New York, 1994
- How corporate parents add value to the stand-alone performance of their businesses, Business Strategy Review 5(4), 33 to 56, 1994
- Corporate strategy: the quest for parenting advantage, Harvard Business Review 73(2), March to April 1995, 1995
- Designing effective organizations: how to create structured networks, Wiley, June 2002 (ISBN 978-0-7879-6064-3), 368 pages, 2002
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Parenting advantage
Ideas
Parenting advantage. Corporate strategy must answer which businesses the company, rather than its rivals, should own and why, and what structure, processes, and philosophy will make them perform better. Caveat: Practitioner article; HBR's summary was read.
Corporate management styles. With Goold, showed that centers of diversified companies shape their businesses through planning influence and control influence; on these two dimensions they define eight management styles, of which strategic planning, strategic control, and financial control are the main ones and much the most common among the 16 British companies they studied. Caveat: Only short passages of the book were read.
Parenting advantage. With Goold and Alexander, argued that parents more often destroy than add value to their businesses' stand-alone performance, and add value only where a real opportunity, suitable parenting skills, and feel for the business's success factors coincide. Caveat: Four firms chosen as successes.
Nine tests of organization design. With Goold, proposed nine tests that any design option can be put through, four fit tests (market advantage, parenting advantage, people, and feasibility) and five good design tests (specialist cultures, difficult links, redundant hierarchy, accountability, and flexibility), for a structured network: the most self-management possible with enough structure and hierarchy to work well. Caveat: A practitioner book; only the publisher's excerpt of chapter 1 was read, including its Figure 1.2.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.