Organisational change

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.

Our body, nature, the universe, they are all examples of so-called holarchies, hierarchies of parts that are grouped to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the composing parts and whereby each part in itself is also a whole. Just like a company with its divisions, departments, etc. Or not?

Formalizing a company's ad hoc peer groups can spur collaboration and unlock value.

Why companies like Best Buy design their office spaces to encourage more employee interactions

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.

Creativity has always been at the heart of business, but until now it hasn't been at the top of the management agenda. By definition the ability to create something novel and appropriate, creativity is essential to the entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started and that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. But perhaps because creativity was considered unmanageable-too elusive and intangible to pin down-or because concentrating on it produced a less immediate payoff than improving execution, it hasn't been the focus of most managers' attention.

Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society's trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession.

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.

A successful campaign to save 100,000 lives shows that efforts to make it easier for organizations to innovate can yield remarkable results.

In quantum mechanics, there is a well-known concept, called the wave-particle duality, which essentially means that all matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. In modern business, we have a similar duality with management and creativity. Well, almost.

At a recent Harvard Business Publishing post, Professor Teresa Amabile asked an interesting question: is management the enemy of creativity? Teresa argued that it was the bureaucracy in management that caused the gradual loss of creativity in big corporations. Therefore, a major revision of modern management must be up to the calendar.

There's a crisis in corporate management. While the basis of competition has shifted decisively to innovation, most management tools and approaches are still geared to exploit established ideas rather than explore new ones.

The creation of knowledge, products, and services by online communities of companies and consumers is still in its earliest stages. Who knows where it will lead?

"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:

Increasingly, Web 2.0 solutions are making inroads into the enterprise. However, both employers and employees still have to discover what are the mutual rights, obligations and associated risks.

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.

Today I flew Southwest for the first time in a while. (I was headed from my home in Philly to Pittsburgh for a customer meeting.) Along the way, I got an interesting and unexpected lesson in the value of self-organization.

Companies are using more Web 2.0 tools and technologies than they were last year, sometimes for more complex business purposes, according to McKinsey's second annual survey on Web 2.0. Companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise.

We can't build a team or organization that's different from us. We can't make them into something we're not. Failing to follow this principle is the single biggest reason that so many team and organization change and improvement efforts flounder or fail. The changes and improvements we try to make to others must ring true to the changes and improvements we're also trying to make to ourselves.