Advice for CEOs

In today’s extraordinarily dynamic business climate, companies face many fast emerging challenges from an ever more complex and interdependent marketplace. The shelf life of successful strategies, brands and products is constantly diminishing, requiring faster, iterative product development cycles. The destabilizing forces of technology and globalization mean that every disruptive business model is a starting point for someone else to develop the next one. All this challenges a business owner’s ability to plot out a course and stick to it.

When we ask ourselves who within an organization has authority in a certain area of the company’s operations, we tend to automatically want to check the organization chart. That’s not a bad thing. Organizations all rely to some extent on the concepts of hierarchy, authority, accountability and decision rights. Organization charts help to communicate responsibilities and accountabilities for business activities and functions.