A Love Letter to Org Charts
An often overlooked attribute of a high-performing company.
In the history of business, we’ve come up with many ways to make the organizational chart more approachable.
There is the upside-down kind, with the CEO at the bottom. There is the interactive digital kind. And then there is the cutesy kind, like Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s, where each manager was represented by a different kind of tree. (Martha herself was a beech, described by an accompanying caption as “the mother tree . . . one of the most beautiful and popular of the shade trees.”)
Though I’ve never assigned myself a botanical identity, I have been known for my own org-chart quirks. In one of my early CEO roles, I managed to fit all 250 employees on a double-sided piece of 11×17 paper that I carried around with me everywhere, and personally updated with each new hire. My executive team ribbed me abou…
