Andrew Campbell
Andrew Campbell is Director of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre at Ashridge Business School. Together with Michael Goold, he is a world authority on corporate strategy with classic texts such as “Corporate Level Strategy” and “Strategy for the Corporate Level”. He is also an authority on organisation design being the person who developed “the nine tests of good organisation design” and with Michael Goold the book “Designing Effective Organisations”.
More recently Andrew has focused on operating models. He believes that there is a gap in thinking about how to convert strategy into operational success and how to use insights about operational capabilities to develop better strategies. Operating models help fill this gap and design thinking helps managers creatively develop winning operating models. His book on operating models is titled “Operating Model Canvas” and is designed to dovetail with the Business Model Canvas tool.
Andrew has published more than 10 books and a similar number of articles in the Harvard Business Review.
Visit his LinkedIn page or @operatingmodels on Twitter
This Blog and the Photograph
This blog has been restructured to support the book Operating Model Canvas. The categories link to the POLISM framework and the list of tools in Chapter 3 of the book. Please search through the categories to find what you want: scroll down the right hand margin to find “categories”.
The blog used to be headed by a photograph of woods in spring. I chose it because of a quote by the late Sumantra Ghoshal. “Most companies are like Calcutta in summer. The atmosphere saps your energy, so that it is an effort to get anything done. But some are like the woods around Insead in spring. You are filled with enthusiasm and hope. You walk with a spring in your step. Everything seems possible”. A well designed operating model is like the woods in spring.
In addition, Ashridge Executive Education is set in beautiful beech woods. Herds of deer often emerge onto the golf course just in front of the school.
It was necessary to remove this photograph to make the Hult Ashridge brand visible … and the brand is necessary if the blog is to be linked to the course website. Maybe a bit of Calcutta creeping into my own organization!
Ashridge on Operating Models 
hey andrew great to see you and hear your latest thinking and work on operational models.strategic thinking and principles are timeless but execution is time and place specific.as the short french general said each battle has its own personaility…including disorder…more strength to the eye mind and fingers…best nick binedell
I think this is an interesting blog. Like most strategy consultants you are showing in some of your postings some basic questioning which is due partly to your background. Because of the ‘blue sky’ projects (books, consultancy), you probably do not have hands on experience with say developing an enterprise architecture. Ultimately these techniques are just one aspect of finding the solutions for the client. Which one to use will largely depend on individual circumstances.
I would have thought ‘operating model’ would be a subset of your expertise in organisation design anyway.
There is a link between operating model work and organisation design work … and yes the techniques used do depend on circumstances. I use the analogy of a carpenter. You have lots of different types of jobs and a bag of tools and need to select the right tool for the right moment.