ABSTRACT
Most large-scale change efforts in established enterprises fail to meet expectations because nearly all models of organization design, effectiveness, and change assume that stability is not only desirable but also attainable. The theory and practice in organization design explicitly encourage organizations to seek alignment, stability, and equilibrium. The predominant logic of organizational effectiveness has been that an organization’s t with its environment, its execution, and its predictability are the keys to its success. Organizations are encouraged to institutionalize best practices, freeze them into place, focus on execution, stick to their knitting, increase predictability, and get processes under control. These ideas establish stability as the key to performance. Stability of distinctive competitive advantage is a strong driver for organization design because of its expected link to excellence and effectiveness (see Subsection 5.2.3.1, “Vantage Time”). Leveraging a vantage requires commitments that focus attention, resources, and investments to the chosen alternatives. In other words, vantage results when enterprises nely hone their operations to perform in a particular way. This leads to large investments in operating technologies, structures, and ways of doing things. If such commitments are successful, they lead to a period of high performance and a considerable amount of positive reinforcement. Financial markets reward stable vantages and predictable streams of earnings: a commitment to alignment reects a commitment to stability.
