As competitive pressures increase, top‐level managers in many companies have recognized the need to rebuild initiative, creativity, and drive in the front‐line units of their organizations. Under the banner of “inverting the pyramid,” they delayered and destaffed, and invested...

Large, diversified companies which flourised in the early decades following the Second World War are in deep trouble. The organizational structure of this period which provided the elixir -- the multidivisional enterprise -- has proved incapable of meeting the changed world environment and the...