Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

A high level of organizational alignment is essential for achieving top performance.Some leaders think you can just move some of the boxes around the org chart and BINGO—you’ll have a high performing organization. Not true.Alignment means that all parts and processes are integrated and supportive of the business strategy. When you get alignment right, it produces a focus and energy that helps move your team and organization from good to great.Mastering The Cube is a great book! It discusses the stumbling blocks and building blocks required to achieve a highly aligned organization. Lots of good insights and lessons learned.This book will help you see the big picture and will assist you in understanding how all the pieces need to fit together to produce an aligned organization.I highly recommend this book for anyone involved in implementing change.

I read this as I was exploring whether I might become a consultant for the company! It made so much sense I joined! With 25 years of corporate experience it was the first time I said a resounding "Yes" to the way organizational design can be implemented to gain and build strategic value!

Limited utility, traded it in at the end of the term

A must for anyone trying to understand how teams need to work together to achieve organizational change that lasts.

Great book

Insightful, easy to follow, practical examples, and clear prose. Great read.

Mastering the Cube is an incredible guide to help an organization align everything to its strategy. The authors list 8 common stumbling blocks that prevent organizations from becoming everything for which they aspire. However, the authors also explain 8 critical building blocks that will propel an organization to become well aligned, giving it the best chance to reach its strategic targets and being a market leader. Our organization chose Mastering the Cube as our organization design model after a careful, collaborative analysis of 5 other organization design models. Mastering the Cube has already been put into practice, as we have even renamed our redesign teams as "alignment" teams. Our President read the entire book in a weekend and kept me apprised of his discoveries with several insightful comments throughout the weekend. Now, senior leadership is reading it and apply its lessons to help align our organization to reach our third century vision target goals.

This books answers most of the challenges business leaders and HR practicioners faced everytime we are required to look at our structure and organizations. Borrowing the quote from Dave Hanah "All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get" Reed Deshler takes it further and break it down to 8 Stumbling Blocks and proposing 8 Building Blocks to contrarest them.Activity follows strategy and structure follows activity, are two of my favourite concepts in the book. A masterpiece of Organizational Design.