Works
- Organizational strategy, structure, and process, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978; reissued by Stanford University Press, 2003 (Stanford Business Classics), 1978
- Organizational strategy, structure, and process, Academy of Management Review 3(3), 546 to 562, 1978
- Organizations: new concepts for new forms, California Management Review 28(3), 62 to 73, 1986
- Managing 21st century network organizations, Organizational Dynamics 20(3), 5 to 20, 1992
- Characteristics of managerial careers in the 21st century, Academy of Management Executive 10(4), 17 to 27, 1996
- Organizing in the knowledge age: anticipating the cellular form, Academy of Management Executive 11(4), 7 to 20 (the journal now titled Academy of Management Perspectives), 1997
- TheFuture.org, Long Range Planning 33(3), 300 to 321, 2000
- Collaborative entrepreneurship: a business model for continuous innovation, Organizational Dynamics 35(1), 1 to 11, 2006
- The I-form organization, California Management Review 51(4), 61 to 76, 2009
- Designing organizations to meet 21st-century opportunities and challenges, Organizational Dynamics 39(2), 93 to 103, 2010
- Organizing continuous product development and commercialization: the collaborative community of firms model, Journal of Product Innovation Management 28(1), 3 to 16 (published online December 16, 2010), 2011
- The architecture of collaboration, Strategic Management Journal 33(6), 734 to 750, 2012
- Designing firms to fit the future, Journal of Organization Design 1(2), 69 to 74, 2012
In Organizational Structures
Known for
With Charles Snow, the network and cellular forms and the strategy typology of prospectors, analyzers, defenders, and reactors.
Ideas
The dynamic network form. A new combination of strategy, structure, and management process built on vertical disaggregation, internal and external brokering, full-disclosure information systems, and market substitutes for administrative mechanisms. Caveat: A forecast and a description, not a test.
The cellular form. Organizations built on entrepreneurship, self-organization, and member ownership, expected to suit work that needs continuous learning and innovation. Caveat: Conceptual and anticipatory; no independent empirical test was found.
Actor-oriented architecture. Self-organizing actors, shared commons, and protocols and infrastructures for collaboration as the elements of new designs. Caveat: Applied to illustrative organizations, not tested.
Strategic types. With Snow, Miles named defender, prospector, analyzer, and reactor types, each with matching structure and process. Caveat: Doty, Glick, and Huber (1993) found support for fit to these types.
The futures group. With Scaringella, proposed a futures group to synchronize a firm's technology and market development: an entrepreneurial unit, organized as a matrix of specialists, that funds ventures and spin-offs and may span several firms. Caveat: A design proposal with no test.
The collaborative community of firms. With Snow, Fjeldstad, and Lettl, described the collaborative community of firms through Blade.org, which joined a shared knowledge commons with explicit mechanisms for direct collaboration among member firms. Caveat: One illustrative case.