
Napoleon as Organizational Designer (2009) [pdf] - nucatus
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a501580.pdf
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pjc50
This is probably easier to follow if you have read Clausewitz, and understand
the pressures pertaining to an on-foot army. E.g. the references to "foraging"
would today probably be called "looting".

The central organisational challenge was: how to march 250,000 men on foot
across a continent with no motor transport for supplies nor radio
communications? It was more effective to spread out, but this required
delegating authority down the hierarchy. Effectively the Grand Armee was a set
of smaller micro-armies that allowed it to overcome the scaling challenge.

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a_d
Adding more “micro army” pods would exponentially increase the coordination
costs / communication overhead. If communication is the main challenge then
decentralizing power would lead to more org ineffectiveness
(centralized/command-control structures would be better).

Anyway, as I commented earlier: I think the authors miss the central
innovation that _enabled_ org innovation — which is all the tech Napoleon
developed around messaging!

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azernik
He also, however, managed to reduce the coordination costs by that eternal go-
to - finding subordinates he could trust, who would grok his plans well enough
to DTRT even without a lot of communication. The Napoleonic armies had an
enormous number of talented generals aside from the Great Man himself.

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a_d
The authors don’t do enough to sell the basic org design framework well. Then
they use this (somewhat weak) framework to analyze Napolean’s org design.
Makes it a v confusing paper. (Also, the hero worship throughout the paper
makes it seem like everything Neapolean did, fits their beautiful theory. Too
much fitting going on :))

“Strategy should utilize the five basic principles of organizational design:
division of labor, unity of command, authority and responsibility, spans of
control, and contingency factors.”

What!? No one designs orgs like this. Orgs are designed around:

A) “Axis of Excellence” (Eg if you want functional excellence in your org - ie
the best salesperson to lead sales, the best marketer to lead marketing - then
you organize around functions likes Sales, Marketing, Engineeing etc). OR,

B) “Max{Collaborative Output} and Min{Communication Overhead}” needs - Eg if
people across functions need to collaborate closely to produce a business
result then one create those units accordingly - they could be line of
business units ( eg textile: spinning, packaging etc) or geo-based units.

Looking at the framework they use makes me wonder what useless theories are
being taught in MBA schools :-)

The most interesting bit in the paper is about messaging. Seems like Napoleon
invented HipChat/Slack of his day to make his orgs work more smoothly. That
was quite cool!

“Napoleon utilized the existing technology of the Chappe’s semaphore telegraph
to improve his message traffic. He maximized its potential by constructing
towers across Europe creating a communications web that would cover his
expanding empire (Elting, 1988). When messages were too long or not as
important to use Chappe’s telegraph, Napoleon relied on the European postal
system. He made improvements by creating an express courier service. Messages
were carried in a lock box with a logbook that showed the date and time of
arrivals and departures of couriers to each post house”

~~~
azernik
Your critique of the analytical framework is based on the assumption that this
is a business school paper. It isn't. It's from the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, and uses specifically military terminology and design
considerations.

In military organizational design, "unity of command" [1] is absolutely a
central tenet, given the need for precise coordination and the high costs of
momentary lapses thereof; "authority and responsibility" is a closely related
concept, since unity of authority without responsibility, or unity of
responsibility without authority, produces all kinds of perverse
organizational incentives. "Contingency factors" [2] are also an
organizational principle especially important to military operations given the
time-sensitive nature of their activities and the adversarial nature of their
obstacles.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_of_command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_of_command)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_theory)

~~~
marktangotango
Some notable people ended up on the faculty there iirc Gary Kildall (cp/m) and
Richard Hamming for example.

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GnarfGnarf
You'd expect a "Post-grad" to spell it right:

"Grande Armée"

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godelmachine
So the Grande Armee was more like Distributed Systems?

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dehef
TL;PL?

(Trop Long; Pas Lu?)

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truthwhisperer
Why is this MSc based material? Which hypothesis does he wants to accept or
reject? Just a description is not worth a dissertation on uni equal level. At
least not in Europe...

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donquichotte
My thoughts exactly. This is a 40 page high school essay.

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gcb0
welcome to the military

