The Viability of Organizations Vol. 1 (eBook)

Today's complexity, speed, and need for adaptation are putting organizations under stress. Understanding how organizations function and truly come alive has become a critical competency. And yet, organizations still seem to lack a solid understanding of what constitutes meaningful, viable, and effective organizational structures.

Using the Viable System Model (VSM) as a framework, this three-volume compendium volume offers readers a new and comprehensive perspective on organizations and how they function beyond the organizational chart. Moreover, it equips readers with a rigorous methodology for analyzing organizations and addressing deep-seated organizational dysfunctions, while also showing them how to redesign their structures and develop better and more tailor-made solutions.

This first volume introduces readers to the VSM and its main components. Readers are taken on a journey, allowing them to rediscover all-too-familiar aspects in the life of their organization and to become aware of the critical success factors for its smooth functioning and long-term viability. In turn, volumes 2 and 3 provide an in-depth introduction to diagnosing and designing organizations with the help of the VSM. For academics, this compendium rediscovers a theoretical perspective that can help them understand macro-structural issues; at the same time, for VSM experts and researchers alike, it resolves many open aspects in the VSM framework.  

Wolfgang Lassl is a management consultant and researcher with a long and successful track record both in management consultancy and academia. He looks back at teaching assignments such as at the University of Vienna and Tufts University. He is an associate of the Peter Drucker Society Europe and a member of the program steering committee of the Annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. Having worked for international consultancies, he is now a director at the Pure Managementgroup.