* Gaps: A full-service organization includes all of the functional building blocks. If any are missing, critical activities will not occur with reliability and quality.

Ensure that responsibility for every building block is placed somewhere in the new organization chart, whether or not it's a full-time job.

This does not mean that every building block must be staffed with permanent resources, whether or not demand for its services exists. It simply means that someone must be accountable for every line of business, whether the work is fulfilled by one's own staff or contractors. That manager can then select and supervise contractors, and build staff as workload warrants.

* Rainbows: Don't combine building blocks unless you have strong business reasons (no rainbows).

Designing a job that's responsible for multiple building blocks inevitably creates impossible requisite variety, and generally creates conflicts of interests. The result is lower performance.

Thus, it is best to separate the building blocks (with their conflicting objectives), ideally leaving only the organization's executive responsible for more than one.

Reserving inevitable conflicts of interests for the highest possible level of the organization has a number of advantages. It ensures that the most seasoned leaders, those with the broadest strategic purview, deal with the difficult balancing acts involved in paradoxical objectives such as innovation versus operational stability.

It also separates conflicting forces so that the executive can explicitly adjust the balances among them.

Focusing jobs on a single functional building block also sends a clear message to everybody in the organization about their roles and their relationships to each other and to clients. Excellence comes from focusing on one subject area in great depth.

Clearly focused jobs also help people understand what others in the organization offer, building a basis for collaboration.

Generally, the impulse to create rainbows can be addressed through better teamwork among specialists.

* Scattered campuses: Keep all related lines of business (each high-level building block) together under a common boss. The job of this boss is to cultivate the function, and to ensure that the domain is covered completely and without overlaps.

Furthermore, in a healthy structure, groups are defined by product lines (i.e., what they produce for clients and each other) rather than by tasks or "roles and responsibilities" (what they do). The result is termed "whole jobs," where people are responsible for every aspect of producing a set of products or services.

With whole jobs, people can be entrepreneurial, and they feel a sense of ownership of a portion of their organization's business.

Whole jobs are also the basis for empowerment. By focusing them on products and services, people become creative about the processes by which they deliver those results. Furthermore, whole jobs are the basis for customer focus, since people who "sell" products understand they have customers to please.

* Inappropriate substructure: Layer by layer, divide people up based on the building block's product line, i.e., based on their specialty. The nature of each building block determines the appropriate basis for structure within that part of the organization.

For example, if groups are divided by client (business unit, industry, or market segment), they will get to know their clients very well and become generalists with regard to other dimensions (such as the organization's products and technologies). On the other hand, if groups are divided by technologies, they will become specialists in their respective disciplines and gain only a general knowledge of clients' businesses. In a healthy organization chart, boundaries are defined in terms that match people's specialties.