Abstract
Economic growth and sustainable value creation are a company’s most important long-term targets. However, practical experience shows that large structures notoriously suffer from efficiency losses due to increasing organizational complexity and bureaucracy. To realize a profitable growth, companies have to be good in handling their internal diseconomies caused by the increased complexity of large organizations [Matt, 2007/b]. This hypothesis is confirmed by a study of the St. Gallen Centre of Organizational Excellence (CORE) in which 300 large European enterprises were analyzed within a period of 10 years [Gomez et al., 2007]. The results of the research show: the central challenge for profitable growth consists in a company’s ability to continuously improve its organization in efficiency and flexibility. Thus, one of the major challenges is to select an organizational system configuration that promotes a sustainable business growth and is easy to operate and manage. In this paper a concept for reducing the complexity of an organizational system is discussed in order to maintain a company’s high system efficiency as a success factor for sustainable growth. Starting from the Axiomatic Design based complexity theory a procedure is presented that helps system designers and operations managers not only to design organizational systems with low or zero time-independent complexity, but also to re-initialize the once designed organizational system before time-dependent combinatorial complexity drives it to fail, i.e. to lose its competitiveness due to heavy losses in efficiency. A central aspect is the identification of a functional periodicity. With the help of a practical example the concept of the organizational periodicity is explained, a generally applicable cycle with four phases that is adapted to the individual company’s situation by compressing or stretching the sinus curve over the timeline.