What's not on the list and why: strategies, people, and personal skills.

Many leadership frameworks include business strategies, people, and "leadership" skills (meaning the ability to inspire and manage others).

While these are extremely important to success, they are not part of a framework of organizational design.

Strategies: An organization designed to optimize today's strategies would not only fail at tomorrow's strategies. It would fail to generate tomorrow's strategies.

Dynamic organizations must be designed at a deeper level, designed to generate, adapt to, and implement ever-changing strategies.

People: Similarly, people are critical but are not an attribute of organizational design. Selecting, motivating, and managing the performance of people is fundamental. These processes are part of the design of an organization, but the people themselves are not.

Leadership Skills: The ability to inspire and manage people is a key talent in effective leaders. However, it's an individual capability, not part of the design of the organization.

Note that these skills will go with you when you leave your current organization. However, any investment you've made in the design of your organization is a legacy that will remain forevermore.

Not every executive-level issue is an aspect of organizational design. Organizational systems have three qualities:

* They are stable.

* They are pervasive, and influence everyone's performance.

* They are controllable, and can be consciously designed.