What type of organisation do you work for?

What type of organisation do you work for? A simple question! I work for a bank, council,
retailer. I work for a big, small, medium-sized company.

There’s more to organisations than that though. Organisations are complex things and
people often need to describe them in different ways. Even people working within the same
organisation might need to describe it differently. By having a range of ways in which we can
classify and compare organisations we can start to understand how they work. So, the most
common ways of describing organisations are according to ownership - who owns the
organisation. Is the organisation private? Public? Voluntary? Or part of a franchise?

Reach

What geographical location does the organisation cover? Is it local? For example in only one
City? Or is national? Regional? Spanning several countries or global?

Evolution

How does the organisation behave when confronted with change? Is it static? Fixed in both
size and practice? Is it dynamic - growing larger but with relatively little change in practice?
Or, is it adaptive - changing size and practice in response to the world around it?

Age

Rather than just counting the years, it’s often useful to think of the age of an organisation in
terms of maturity. Is it a start-up? Immature or a mature organisation? Just like people, some
organisations mature faster than others and some never grow up.

Client focus

What kind of clients does the organisation deal with? Business to business organisations will
often work in a very different way to business to consumer organisations.

Production focus

Does the organisation focus on providing a service or producing a product?

Delivery channel

How is the product service delivered? Is it online, face to face or a blend of both?

So, think again. What kind of organisation do you really work for?