EdX

Organizational Design: Creating Competitive Advantage (edX)

Organizational Design: Creating Competitive Advantage (edX)

Learn how to design control systems, decision-making processes and a culture that enables value creation and the development of sustainable competitive advantage. In order to sustain themselves, organizations need to compete for scarce resources both in input and output markets. Because of this organizations need to create some kind of competitive advantage.

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In this business and management course, suitable for managers and leaders in midsize to large organizations, you will learn the principles of organizational design and how design elements can be leveraged to gain competitive advantage. We will discuss various organizational structures and how an effective organizational design can help achieve a company’s goals and objectives in a sustainable manner. Since organizations involve collaborative activities, you’ll also learn how to create suitable control systems, decision-making processes and culture and reporting relationships to ensure that the efforts of a diverse set of employees are suitably coordinated to achieve the organizational purpose.

What you'll learn

  • Interrelationship between an organization’s strategy and structure
  • Effective use of control systems
  • How to achieve Competitive advantage through different designs
  • Structural alternatives such as functional, divisional and matrix
  • Structural tradeoffs such as centralization, formalization and complexity
  • How to manage structural change

Course Syllabus

Week 1 :
Interrelationship between organization structure and strategy
Case used – Joy of Running
Relationship between organizations and markets
Control systems in organizations
Case used – Cunningham Motors

Week 2:
Leveraging specialization in organization design
Competitive advantage achieved through different designs
Case discussion of Ford Motors Company and General Motors

Week 3:
Strategic outsourcing
Decision making framework for outsourcing
Variety versus scale tradeoff

Week 4:
Different Organization Structures – functional, divisional and Matrix
Case discussion of a Consumer Durables Company having a hybrid structure
Structural tradeoffs – complexity, formalization and centralization

Week 5:
Mechanistic and Organic designs
Case discussion of Acme and Omega

Week 6:
How to manage structural change
Case used – VFM Solutions
Putting it all together

Go to Class
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