David Gray starts talking at around 10:00
Services co-evolve in the dialogue with the customers
Efficiency (orderly processes) versus Flexibility (adaptability to the market).
Tight coupling (formal classic inflexible org design) versus Loose coupling (easily change components' locations, autonomous locations, holographic design: "pods") Loose coupling implies lower consistency. "podular company" "composability"
Trains versus cars
How does that proposal scale? By creating a shared platform, and then having each pod do its thing.
Institutions are embedded in the cultures, technologies, and infrastructures of their time
Today, competitive advantage is not based on stocks of knowledge, but having access to flows of knowledge to enable up-to-date information that enables adaptability.
Scalable efficiency has been a winning model for the past two centuries. However, it relies on centralized governing systems, rigid hierarchies, and a paradigm of long-term planning and forecasting.
While effective in times of stability and predictability, these systems break down during times of rapid change and uncertainty.
and the emergence of new social and technological infrastructures often catalyzes fundamental institutional innovations.
Survival—the most basic measure of performance—has become more and more challenging.
information asymmetry
it will drive us to reassess the entire architecture of relationships both within and across institutions.
Creating architectures of relationships reaching beyond the walls of our institution is one of the most powerful ways to tap into richer and more diverse flows of knowledge and accelerate learning.
scalable learning
o evolve institutional designs that explicitly seek to accelerate and amplify learning among a growing number of participants
They were an answer to the challenge of organizing thousands of people in different places and with different skills to perform large and complex tasks, like building automobiles or providing nationwide telephone service
Creating a formal organization was key at the time. Creating the formal organization is easier now, thanks to better means for coordinating action: you still need a network of committed people, but not the formality.
They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market
They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products.
the ability of human beings on different continents and with vastly different skills and interests to work together and coordinate complex tasks has taken quantum leaps.
We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.
the even bigger challenge of creating structures that motivate and inspire workers
It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top
Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband
“Our organizations are less capable than the people inside them. Core-incompetency. Every organization today is still run on principles of hierarchy/bureaucracy.”