Understanding Complex Organizations

About the International Press Institute
The International Press Institute (IPI), based in Vienna, is the world’s oldest global press freedom organization, founded in 1950 in the United States by a group of newspaper editors and publishers from around the world.
A membership based organization, IPI “members work cooperatively to shape debate on policies affecting the media to push back against those seeking to restrict the free flow of news and information in order to protect political, economic or other interests.” (Institute, n.d.)

Available Tools for Company Analysis
There are a number of tools that can be used for evaluating the performance and sustainability of the International Press Institute. Like many non-profits,

(Weber, 2008)

c. Balanced Score Card
If the strategic plan is the blueprint, the balanced score card is the soldier.

Balanced score card as a tool takes companies from a plan to action. It requires that people put into action the plan and perform on a daily basis, taking into account the customer, financial issues and business process in order to build critical organizational processes and capacity.

Created by the brilliant Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and Dr. David Norton, its focus is on adding “strategic non-financial performance measurements to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more ‘balanced’ view of organizational performance.” (Institute, 2016)

d. Benchmarking
Benchmarking measures the quality of an organization’s work based on the work of its

It is also notable that despite managers taking time to do the exercise, in the end, the executive director big-footed the process and put together a plan based almost solely on his own SWOT Analysis.
The Expanded 7-S Framework is a very necessary tool for IPI.
The small, international team, the vast majority of whom are not journalists and whom have never worked in a newsroom, are removed from the day-to-day challenges of their membership, all of whom are journalists of academics who specialize in media. This distance causes a disconnect with reality of the ground.
The Expanded 7-S Framework is necessary to align the organization’s strategy with shared values. It would also be immensely helping in evaluating staff skills and style, particularly since so many of the staff have been at the organization for a prolonged period of time and are, frankly, not as vested in the work of journalism as they should be.
The benefit of the Balanced Score Card is that it will move the organization, including its board of directors, from always “planning” and “strategizing,” to actually implementing change.
One of the greatest weaknesses of IPI is its inability to change, to actually change. And its inability to embrace innovation and