In The Agility Factor: Building Adaptable Organizations for Superior Performance, the authors (Christopher G. Worley, Thomas D. Williams, and Edward E. Lawler III) reveal the factors that drive long-term profitability based on the practices of successful companies that have consistently outperformed their peers.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation
This “short format” publication by Christopher G. Worley, Thomas D. Williams, and Edward E. Lawler III is a “tools” product that describes how to assess an organization’s level of agility. The book features two forms of assessment.
Corporate Stewardship Conference
Corporate Stewardship Conference hosted by the Center for Effective Organizations, Honoring Warren Bennis, with speakers Howard Schultz, Chief Executive Officer, Starbucks, Terri Kelly, Chief Executive Officer, W. L. Gore & Associates, and James Sinegal, Co-Founder and Director, Costco.
Change Management is Obsolete: Learnings from Research and Practice About What’s Next, 7/30/13, Recording/Slides
There’s little disagreement that we are living in an increasingly VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The question is what are we doing about it? In this webinar Chris Worley and Sue Mohrman will characterize the world we live in and explore the obsolescence of the design and change models that we use.
Building Networks and Partnerships for Sustainability
Christopher G. Worley, Philip H. Mirvis, Susan Albers Mohrman, and Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, Editors (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013) The volume explores how collaboration, partnership, and networks are being developed to support the achievement of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
Janice Schonwetter (AlignOrganizations): Organizational Design Refresher Webinar, 2/26/2013
Janice presents a case dealing with the redesign of HR in a large, global engineering design and services company. A very systematic example of working through the issues of leveraging services across businesses and across regions and how to organize for that.
So you Want to be Agile? Find a Balance Between “Fat” and “Muscle”, 1/10/2013
In this webinar, Chris Worley and Sue Mohrman will describe their learnings about designing organizations for agility. There are many paradoxes inherent in such designs. Agility requires accepting a certain amount of slack that absorbs the risk of investing in their future while relentlessly driving down costs in present operations; experimenting on the one hand while systematically incorporating what is learned on the other; and developing people to be ready for the future while making them expert in the present. In agile organizations, change is routine.
HR and Sustainability, 11/27/2012
Ed Lawler, Sue Mohrman, and Chris Worley took a first look at data from a new study on sustainable organizations. A just-completed CEO study focused on HR’s role in corporate sustainability activities. It looked at what HR does and what it would like to do in regards to sustainability.
Exploring the Interface of Organization Design & Work System Design – Creating Sustainably Effective Organizations, 7/17/2012
Sue Mohrman and Chris Worley examine the relationship and the full system of capabilities required to create a sustainably effective organization. Both work system design and organization design are needed and must be orchestrated in order to align the resources and activities of the organization with strategy, and to ensure that valued high quality services and products are reliably and affordably delivered to the customer.
Performance Where It Matters
This article by Tom Williams (Booz & Company) and Christopher G. Worley (CEO) focuses on two related management concerns: (1) is consistent/sustained high performance possible and (2) what might account for it?
Sustained High Performance and the Role of Agility
Tom Williams (Booz & Company), Chris Worley (CEO), Niko Canner (Booz & Company) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explain that “Competitive environments change continuously, and the pace of change continues to increase. Yet some companies in every industry show superior performance relative to their peers over very long periods of time. Does your company have the agility required to keep up?”
Large-Group Interventions: An Empirical Field Study of Their Composition, Process, and Outcomes
Large group interventions are an important method of organization change. This paper by Christopher G. Worley (CEO), Susan A. Mohrman (CEO), and Jennifer Nevitt (Microsoft) received the McGregor Award for the outstanding contribution to the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science for 2011.