Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st Century Organization
McGraw Hill, 2007 | Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia I. Joyce
Based on a decade of exclusive research, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce of McKinsey & Company have come up with a simple yet revolutionary conclusion: Your workforce is the key to growth in the 21st century. By tapping into what are often underutilized talents, knowledge, and skills, businesses can substantially increase net income per employee and manage the interdepartmental complexities and barriers that prevent greater achievement and profits.
Organizational design and redesign are the critical lynchpins to unlocking this value, forming the new model for survival in the modern, digital and very global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to market change, leverage opportunity, and sail past the competition.
In Mobilizing Minds, the authors describe solutions that will simplify the organization, thereby unleashing profits and enhancing long term success for every company. Bryan and Joyce outline innovative principles enabling corporations to:
- Manage complexity, bureaucracy, and redundancy
- Use hierarchical authority to strengthen the effectiveness of key managers and drive performance
- Create formal networks, talent, and knowledge marketplaces that work in a large company
- Motivate and reward wealth-creating behavior
- Pursue organizational design as a key corporate strategy
The essential lesson of Mobilizing Minds is that corporations must put the same energy used to launch new products and processes into their organizational design efforts. That's where the money is. That's where the opportunities lie. That's the key to surviving and prospering in the 21st century.
Read the introduction (PDF—288 KB)
Read chapter 1 (PDF—682 KB)