In the early 1970's, the industrial marketing professors Frederick E. Webster and Yoram Wind, developed the 'buying centre' concept in order to structure large scale sales in complex corporate environments. In the early 1980's, Thomas Bonoma expanded their original list of five roles with the role of initiator. The concept then classified six buying roles...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, synthesised organisational design literature into five ideal organisational forms or configurations that do not exist in the real world, but provide consultants and managers a framework to understand and design organisational structures. Mintzberg defined organisational structure as "the sum total of the ways in which...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...

In the mid 1970's, Marvin Weisbord, an organisational design consultant, created his six boxes model as a diagnostics tool of organisational effectiveness. He identified six key areas in which "things must go right" and be internally consistent for an organisation to be successful. The result of the diagnosis is a prioritised list of ready to be implemented...