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I rarely come across leaders who advocate wholesale organizational redesign or use it as a way to support their people and business. When organizational strategy changes, structures, roles, and functions should be realigned with the new objectives. This doesn't always happen, with the result that responsibilities can be overlooked, staffing can be inappropriate, and people - and even functions - can work against each other.

Business colonies as temporary collaboration structures in order to deliver a given project. The concept seems simple enough. However, is it really that simple?

The future of work will be about temporary groupings of independent actors to deliver specific projects and the deployment of new organizational structures that will support these activities.

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?

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth. Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

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?

In a competitive business environment, safeguarding the continuity of the company often requires starting initiatives that will result in a fundamental discontinuity for the social structure of the organisation. Do we have a choice?

Over the past years, better and more cost effective communication capabilities have been the main drivers for evolutions such as internationalisation, globalisation and outsourcing. Indeed, this improved communication capability has been an enabler for various new and more complex forms of collaboration. At the same time, organisational structures are growing thinner. Is there still room for the traditional company?

There are numerous examples of organisations that succeeded transforming their business model to a new or higher level of success after being forced by external conditions to adjust their existing organisational structure. Knowing this, is there a viable approach that allows us to uncover this hidden potential?

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 goal of the Virtual Company Project is to build online tools to help groups create and implement governance rules necessary for successful collaboration. The project is premised on the belief that the right graphical interfaces can translate the structures of the group into clear and intelligible procedures that will enable teams to make decisions, control assets and enter into contractual relationships with third parties. The Virtual Company project is creating the interfaces and designing the back-end functionality that is needed to enable group participants to see themselves in relation to the group as a whole, allocate roles, establish accountability to the group, make collective decisions, and administer group assets, expenditures and distributions.

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.

This blog is focused on "exploding" old concepts and thinking about economies, organizations, communities, and groups.\n\nWe will focus on patterns of connectivity and self-organizing behavior in economic and social networks and how these new structures lead to resilience, adaptability, agility, transparency, and innovation.

Businesses already have tools to support strategic planning to lower cost, increase quality, and decrease time to market. Agility is another, albeit new and different, factor that proactive managers will use in designing the future of their organizations. A central issue is how to create a strategy that has the most beneficial balance of agility with other qualities. Such decisions have a life cycle. And at the end of the planning life cycle, we have the situation where a strategy has been created. The questions are what decisions are the correct ones to support that strategy, to attain the desired agility. Our agility metrics support this end of strategic planning.

Social Media has demonstrated in many ways capable of meeting or exceeding the deliverable output of many traditional industries such as advertising, marketing, journalism, human resources, design, community organizing, education, and social vetting.

If the human race wants to survive on this planet, it will have to change its behaviour, its institutions, its government structures and its way of doing business. The chaordic theory carries the promise of the better organisational approach that will support this. Can it really work that way?

As time passes by, people and things change. Now, what if time passes by and people change, but things that should change, don't?\n\nIt is not a stationary relic I'm talking about. I'm talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block - the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.