Group items tagged

A future of project-based work does call for the emergence of new organisational structures to support the activities of the individual contributors. How will this be done and by whom?

"In early July I participated in the 2013 Roundtable on Institutional Innovation sponsored by the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Program. The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization that aims "to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues." It holds a variety of seminars, public conferences and other events throughout the year in its Aspen, Colorado and Wye River, Maryland campuses."

In life and in business, agility is a major advantage. However, in life it seems to come more or less naturally, while in business it seems an impossible dream. Some thoughts on change.

"Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. Technology can accelerate a transformation, but technology cannot cause a transformation." Jim Collins. Good to Great.

"You can smell the fresh paint as companies the world over complete their post-recession overhauls. Few business organizations, functions, and processes have escaped this rethink, which is meant to fortify organizations before the next downturn comes At the risk of stirring a hornet's nest, I'd like to ask one question: How many of us CEOs included, as part of the rethink, changes to the CEO's role and responsibilities? "

What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are highly adaptable, endlessly inventive and truly inspiring? Why not indeed. That's the goal that lies at the heart of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX).

Today's enterprises are increasingly facing challenges of rapid change, hyper-competition and complexity. Old methods and structures can no longer support the agility that is needed. Time for a radical management makeover?

Traditional businesses are struggling to recover from the economic downturn. They'll need to shift their focus from profits to authentic social engagement to have meaningful impact in the world.

Implementing change in an organisation is difficult, very difficult. There are numerous reasons or excuses for failure. However, the primary reason for failure is choosing the wrong destination.

Our current economy is highly dynamic and the needs for more flexibility, adaptability and continuous change are continuously increasing. Yet, not all parties have equal strenghts and rights in this game.

If you follow the logic laid out by historians such as the late Alfred Chandler, who wrote classics like Scale and Scope and Strategy and Structure, companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale. The experience curve nicely represents this relationship: The bigger a company gets, the more experience it accumulates, and the more its performance--particularly cost performance--improves.

The past belonged to push, but the future belongs to pull.\nThat's an argument we've made before and in our most recent post, "Why Do Companies Exist?" --as well as more expansively in this Journal of Service Science article. What will pull-based institutions look like? How will they be organized? What dispositions, or mindsets, will they require? And what management practices will help them succeed?

An overlay of end-to-end process management onto existing functional organizations has its rough edges, to say the least. In fact, the transformation to a process-managed enterprise could really mean the End of Management, as we know it.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

"If organizational transformations are to succeed, change can't be thought of as a single, standardized process."

Read/Write Web has taken up the call of Enterprise 2.0 with a new channel on the subject and starts by examining the nature of the firm, how large corporations have amassed huge wealth and control over the past 50 years and the factors contributing to a potential change in this situation:

Dear World Leaders,\nThis relationship isn't working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We've tried to make it work. But it's not us - it's you (really).

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than on their behaviour taken separately - Russell Ackoff

"Bye, bye, organization guy." Those words start the first chapter in the estimable Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation, published in 2007. In that book, Pink observed how increasing numbers of people in the US are choosing to work as independent contractors, temps, and on a project-to-project basis.