New Templates for Today’s Organizations
New Templates for Today’s Organizations by Peter F. Drucker
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Today’s businesses are increasingly complex and diverse. In this article, a well-known organization theorist describes new principles of organization design now in use and their applications to today’s businesses and …ver más…

Instead the main causes of instability are changes in the objective task, in the kind of business and institution to be organized. This is at the root of the crisis of organization practice.

The organization theorists’ traditional answer to “organization crisis”—more organization development—is largely irrelevant to this new problem. Sometimes they seem to be pushing old remedies to cure a disease that no one has heard of before, and that inhabits a totally unfamiliar type of body. The kind of business and institution to be organized today is an enormously different beast from that of 20 years ago.

These changes in the objective task have generated new design principles that do not fit traditional organization concepts. And therein lies the crisis of theory. On the other hand, the past 20 years have also seen the emergence of new understandings of which organization needs require the most attention, and of how to go about the job of analyzing organization needs and designing organization structures. Only when we have an idea of what the new “body” looks like can we begin to treat its ills.

In what follows I compare old models with new realities and describe the new design principles. These principles can be matched to the tasks of modern management as well as to the formal needs of all organizations, independent of their purpose. In