Up the Organization: Core Leadership and Management Skills

This course is approaching a company from three perspectives:

– McKinsey’s 7S framework, meaning looking deeply at Strategy, Structure, Systems, leadership Style, Staff, Skills, and Shared values (or Corporate Culture); next

– Mintzberg’s configurations – meaning by looking which cluster of employees dominates in a company (either Strategic apex, Mid-Line, Techno-structure, Operating core, or Support staff), we can recognize the following typical structures: Simple, Machine Bureaucracy, Professional Bureaucracy, Adhocracy, and Divisional structure. And, each configuration has its own specifics that we, for sure, are going to explain here; and

– Context in which company operates, including traditional factors like size, stage of development, complexity of environment, etc. plus contemporary factors like “Uberization of economy, raising GIG culture, impact of AI, and similar;

Since this is a huge task – we have structured the course around 7 core sections, each explaining one of McKinsey’s 7S elements. Within each section (or element), we are going to compare all 5 Mintzberg’s configurations – for example, from perspective of a Strategy, applied Leadership style, needed managerial Systems to be better run, and similar – we will explain how each configuration is designed to answer that challenge. Through these distinctions – you will better understand your possibilities, either you are an entrepreneur, business leader, or a new manager. Additionally, we are going to incorporate talks about traditional factors within discussion about the configurations, while to add at each section an interesting topic relevant for the mentioned contemporary factors – distributed where we believe it fits the best.

For example, “Uberization” of economy and raising GIG culture is placed within Structure section, since it’s dealing with a business model you are applying. Or, within Styles, we are going to launch talks about Remote and Hybrid work as your leadership challenge.

Finally, we are going to give you hints regarding Change Management (as 8th Section) since all upcoming challenges will force you to think how to “up the organization”.

And, here and there, we are going to share with you some interesting reads or video clips to watch.

Additionally, we want to believe that you are going to love our video format based on drawings – playing with images, symbols, provocative messages and similar – their purpose is to keep your attention and provoke your thinking – meaning you don’t have to agree with me all the time. Yet, if you find this format as not suitable for you – within Resources Section – you can find PDF file covering the entire course. However, we believe it will rather serve you as a reminder, or to write down your own comments for later on.

Of course – before we start – we have to explain some basic terminology and methodology in use – that’s why the next three videos are pretty much elementary – explaining McKinsey’s 7S framework, Mintzberg’s configurations, and factors. If you are familiar with Mintzberg’s work, maybe even Structure section will be a warm-up for you. Yet, after that, we are really going to speed up!

I really hope you are going to enjoy the course!