Structured Empowerment: How to Achieve Growth While Promoting Agility - Hardcover

by Tatiana Sandino (Author)

Discover the secret to balancing growth and agility in your startup

Structured Empowerment: How to Achieve Growth While Promoting Agility by Harvard Business School professor Tatiana Sandino is a groundbreaking guide that addresses the most critical challenge startups face: how to scale effectively without stifling the innovation and spirit that fuel them. This book introduces the concept of "structured empowerment," a method that allows companies to grow by expertly balancing flexibility with structure.

In the book, you'll:

• Learn how to empower employees within a structured framework, enabling them to make decisions that propel growth
• Discover the optimal timing for formalizing management structures without hampering your company's agility
• Gain insights from real-world examples of companies that have succeeded and failed, illustrating the principles of effective growth management

Perfect for business leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs, Structured Empowerment offers a new perspective on managing fast-paced growth. If you're seeking to maintain the delicate balance between agility and structure as your company scales, this book is your must-have roadmap. Dive into Sandino's expert analysis and practical advice to keep your startup on the path to success. Buy your copy today and start empowering your team for growth.

Front Jacket

The transition from great idea to great company is a difficult and fraught one that many startups fail to make gracefully. The traditional approach to managing fast growth--standardizing processes from the top down--often creates needless and ineffective bureaucracy. But exactly what is the alternative to a top-heavy system that suppresses the entrepreneurial spirit of employees and company leaders?

In Structured Empowerment: How to Achieve Growth While Promoting Agility, distinguished Harvard Business School professor Tatiana Sandino delivers an incisive exploration of how to sustain manageable growth in an organization with effective structures and systems. She explains how managers and executives can strike the right balance between agility and structure through an approach she calls "structured empowerment".

The book explains how to grant employees the power to make choices from sets of curated options on inputs and processes--along with the responsibility to deliver results. You'll learn how to keep your employees engaged as the company grows, the right time to formalize management structures and systems, and how to design those systems so that they encourage flexibility without creating chaos.

Structured Empowerment offers new thinking about the principles, guidelines, and approaches that lead to effective systems. You'll discover the why, what, and how of the Structured Empowerment Framework, developed during the author's long experience researching and advising companies across the globe. You'll also find engaging stories that clarify why some high-growth companies fail while others retain flexibility and continue to grow.

Perfect for managers, executives, directors, and other business leaders, Structured Empowerment is also a must-read for entrepreneurs, founders, and employees at startups and fast-growing companies struggling to maintain the difficult balance between agility and structure.

Back Jacket

Praise for Structured Empowerment

"I met Tatiana when Go Mobile was stuck at 30 stores. Tatiana's framework gave me the confidence to transform our business, trusting that our frontline staff could deliver the customer value proposition. Structured Empowerment showed us how to turn mobile phone sales from a commodity business into a premium service experience. We empowered these young employees while providing them with the support and growth opportunities they needed. We shared best practices, unleashed creativity, and held everyone accountable for profitability. Our employees stayed with us year after year, and we built a lasting business. This book is essential for anyone who believes that empowering people--especially those society overlooks--is the path to both business success and social impact."
--MEGHNA MODI, Serial Entrepreneur, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Go Mobile, and Managing Director of Revlon India

"Great businesses emerge intuitively--but when all stars align, how do you teach that magic to others? We grew OXXO from 1,000 to 20,000+ stores by assembling our 'Lego pieces' without instructions. Tatiana Sandino decoded our approach into a clear framework, labeling each piece and showing how structure and empowerment partner to scale organizations, while focusing on the people that make it all work. She transforms what we built through instinct into wisdom others can follow. A must-read for leaders determined to scale with agility, accountability, and heart."
--EDUARDO PADILLA, Former Chief Executive Officer of the leading retail and beverage multinational Mexican company Fomento Econ?mico Mexicano (FEMSA)

"Professor Tatiana Sandino's book addresses the central dilemma faced by leaders of rapidly growing retail enterprises: how to motivate their decentralized, customer-facing employees to deliver innovative and accountable services that align with corporate vision and strategy. Structured Empowerment allows companies to hit the sweet spot between bureaucratic standard operating procedures and uncontrolled local decision making. Readers of Sandino's book will learn the framework and tools for achieving sustainable financial and market growth through a culture of accountable local innovation."
--ROBERT S. KAPLAN, Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development Emeritus, Harvard Business School, co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard

"Structured Empowerment offers a new and insightful way to leverage the tension between local responsiveness and centralized control. Any business that relies on frontline workers to respond to individual customer preferences will find Professor Sandino's book a valuable addition to its tool kit."
--ROBERT SIMONS, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School

"This book tackles one of the grand challenges in business: how an organization can get big without becoming bureaucratic. Drawing on extensive research and rich case studies, Tatiana Sandino offers a practical blueprint for managing people, structure, metrics, and systems so companies can scale rapidly while staying agile and deeply responsive to customers and markets. Structured Empowerment gives leaders a powerful way to balance operating discipline with adaptability as their organizations grow."
--JEFFREY F. RAYPORT, Faculty Member in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and Advisory Partner at Long Arc Capital

Author Biography

TATIANA SANDINO is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration in the Accounting and Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research explores how organizations design management systems and shape culture to guide employees decisions and actions, without stifling their entrepreneurial spirit.