Threaded through the books I've written are stories about how real organisations design and redesign. People like to read about exemplars, examples, comparators and case studies. The organisations I've discussed illustrate both what goes well in organisation design and why this might be so, and also what doesn't work and what can go wrong.
These examples of real organisations are what give the book a shelf life. A company that's an exemplar of good practice one year could take a terrible dive the next and vice versa. All of us writing about Volkswagen or Toyota have seen the highs and lows play out. This makes picking the organisations to mention in a book a bit of a gamble (unless I want to keep writing new editions or have a continuously updateable book).
I am about to write a third edition of one of my books, and the reviewers of the current edition have variously suggested that I illustrate points with more industry sectors, more types of organisation (private, public, partnership, etc.), more global organisations, more sizes of organisation, and fewer UK based one. That's quite a list to consider.
Previously I've taken rather a scattergun approach – finding the stories in the moment that I was writing the chapter. But this time I thought I'd be more systematic. So today I started to work on what organisations to talk about in order to cover the reviewers' (sensible) suggestions.
