Works
- The Age of Unreason, Harvard Business School Press, Boston; Business Books, London, 1989
- Balancing corporate power: a new federalist paper, Harvard Business Review 70(6), November to December 1992, 1992
- The shamrock organisation, Business Strategy Review 25(4), 81 (the journal was later renamed London Business School Review), 2014
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The shamrock and federal organizations, the portfolio career, and The Age of Unreason.
Ideas
The shamrock organization. An organization of three leaves: a core of essential workers (the professional core), a contractual fringe of outside providers, and a flexible labor force. Caveat: Illustrative and prescriptive; only passages of the book were read. Studies of its close relative, Atkinson's flexible firm, found core and periphery strategies rarer and messier than the model (Pollert 1988, Hakim 1990, Håkansson and Isidorsson 2012).
Federalism in organizations. Companies restructuring into integrated organizations, global networks, and leaner corporate centers are, knowingly or not, on a path to federalism as the way to govern complex organizations. Caveat: A Harvard Business Review essay, not a test; only its opening paragraph was read.
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.