Comments

The WL Gore company is a good example. From their web site:

"Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.

Everyone can quickly earn the credibility to define and drive projects. Sponsors help associates chart a course in the organization that will offer personal fulfillment while maximizing their contribution to the enterprise. Leaders may be appointed, but are defined by 'followership.' More often, leaders emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill, or experience that advances a business objective."

Posted by Eric Ralph at November 29, 2006 10:08 AM

Schlumberger is very well known for having effectively implemented a successful organization where huge jumps, either vertical or lateral are possible.

The mobility is huge, and you can go from engineering into Human Resources, through IT, if you want it. The profiles of the managers are amazingly diverse and some of the top managers are very young (mid-thirties).

This sums up in you knowing (even if you are already a top managers) that you will be managed someday by someone you managed and/or younger than you. Not one career is linear and people have huge jumps at moments and slowdowns at others.

This is part of the culture of the company, part of the game to be successful, and is also one of the main reasons the management environment is pretty good. If you know that in the near future, you are likely to be managed by one of your current reports, you're not bound to be harsh ;-)

Posted by Jacques d'Emboise at November 29, 2006 11:32 AM

considering most companies don't last long enough to climb a ladder ...the ladder is a concept that has gone the way of job security. when a company can find ways to seperate compensation from climbing the ladder. so they can make more money doing what they joined the company to do.

Remmeber they ladder useually got people to the point where they where least usefull.

There is no one organizational structure that works best .. there are plenty that will work effectively for the few years products last now

Posted by ken Oneill at November 29, 2006 11:45 AM

re: if companies must be flat (less hierarchical) to thrive in the business environment today and in the future ... how does an existing company go about accomplishing this?

I agree totally w/Ken O'Neill, but I think it's unlikely a big organization (say, over 500 people) could ever make structural mutation part of its repertoire. The WL Gore example (a single, stable underlying model designed to allow for a certain amount of flex built around the ability carefully-filtered talented people to strive for flexibility) may be more viable above that body count.

Matthew Budman wrote a most-excellent piece for The Conference Board Review's last issue, "Can We Turn Back The Rising Tide of Incompetence?".

http://www.conference-board.org/articles/atb_article.cfm?id=359

It addresses organisational structure as one of the factors that promotes incompetence, and he suggests alternatives. I strongly recommend it as informative+fun reading.

Posted by jeff angus at November 29, 2006 12:29 PM

I'm also listening to that audio book! Long, but good stuff.

I think the company transition process requires:
1) plotting out the company employee structure and its underlying value creation chains.
2) Identifying how modern communication technology can minimize business process times, while improving the quality of communication and employee satisfaction. (Happy Employees = always good)
3) If some employees' jobs seem redundant, perhaps their job description can be enlarged. If they're traditional staff/dept. managers, can they become LESS-SO managers of people and MORE-SO customer satisfaction managers from a team leader perspective?

There are many more ways to view this; these are just some of mine scratching the surface

Posted by Mario Vellandi at November 29, 2006 1:15 PM

Jeff Bezos of Amazon futuristic vision - harnass the power of Amazon, Wal$Mart, Starbucks, Nordstrom - from your 6-car heated garage office - reach out worldwide.

1. "We can take all the things that used to be fixed costs and let people pay by the drink," Bezos says. "It's letting people create a business by remote control."

2. "You're going to be able to have virtual start-ups, virtual entrepreneurship," says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, which is betting on a vision similar to Amazon's. "It will be the next wave."

http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=112003I1KU5S

Posted by sean_seattle_millionaire at November 29, 2006 1:56 PM

So the corporate model of value generation has evolved from hierarchal (Ford, Sears) to a market based one (Wal-Mart, Banks) to a distributed global one (Skype, TopCoder, GoldCorp). Each step of the way, the environmental hammer has flattened and squashed the organization to the point that it doesn’t really exist. The organization has no boundaries, no one is as smart as all of us, and geographical limitation is an illusion. If you not a Web 2.0 expert or collaborative specialist then now is the time to get started. Now, yesterday…

Posted by RTodd at November 29, 2006 2:02 PM

Hi Darci - great topic. My three simplicity tips are

Simplicity Tip Number 1
Staff at the front line know ALL the answers ALL the time.

Simplicity Tip Number 2
If managers have a job at all in 2006 it is to make it easy for front line staff to do their job with freedom.

Simplicity Tip Number 3
Give all the money – YES ALL THE MONEY to front line staff

As such your challenge become irrelevant - my answer is to empower all the staff so that we don’t have a ‘pecking order’ in a vertical or horizontal sense – ALL WE HAVE is people doing the work and plotting their own career course.

Is that Anarchical? - Absolutely

Is that Common sense? - Absolutely

Front line people don’t need to be ‘managed’ in 2006 – they might need ‘mentoring’ which is completely different than ‘managing.’ People are in charge their own destiny and the only point of a management structure diagram on a piece of paper is to provide some fun for the staff in finding a way to ignore it completely and just get on with their job to add value.

Recruit for attitude and train for skills is my opinion. The mindset used to be that career paths were incremental and predictable. For instance I was told by my first boss when I was 16 years old in the National Health Service that I had a job for life ‘as long as I didn’t pinch the petty cash or rape the Matron’ – neither appealed to me by the way :-)

That ‘security’ has gone – thank God I say - and each person is now the Chief Executive of his/her own career.

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 29, 2006 2:02 PM

Simplicity Tip Number 4:

Give all the money – YES ALL THE MONEY to Sean [Flat Phat World, Thank You, ha ha]

Posted by sean_thank_you at November 29, 2006 2:31 PM

Maybe we all do end up working on our own, but I think that institutions/organizations are still going to be around for a while. Given that, larger organizations might try flattening out a department. I worked for a couple of years in a good sized company with a large marketing organization (100+ people). We talked about something along the lines of the W Gore model for a bit, but it never happened - I believe because the VP with the biggest group felt threatened. We did use a modified version for our product launches, however. We'd assemble teams (people could volunteer, but weren't guaranteed a spot) with members who had expertise in different areas. A launch captain would be chosen - not necessarily the most senior person by any means - and away we went. Nothing to do with marketing, but the company failed - a pretty public dot.com era goner - so I guess the experiment wasn't such a great success. But our product launches ran more smoothly, junior people got more exposure and experience, etc. - so in that respect it worked.

Posted by Maureen Rogers at November 29, 2006 8:04 PM

this is a great post. I like RTodd's take on this !! If your an't being web2.0' ified then get going !!

I speak of this because I just got let go from an f50 company.. yeah couple hr's ago.. i just posted on my site

http://peterdawson.typepad.com/blog/2006/11/im_unemployeed_.html

but I am still blogging, and doing all the normal things that I do.. why ?? because having walked 4 continents and work in them, the world is truly flat .. btw the world is flat was driven a lot from the UPS school of thought ( wherein which was my last employee)..

Now coming to the talent aspect, they (Corprates) still dont get it.PERIOD. Its still the old school boy style of managment.. A comes before B etc. bottom line matters. The corporate shreek of "we value our employees/customers" is just talk.. they dont want attitude , they want to maintain status quo.. and that is a BOGU (bend over and grease up) attitude.. if one KowTows to this, then its all goodie goodies..

Talent is not yet a factor that needs to be adhered too in the corporate world !

Posted by /pd at November 29, 2006 8:15 PM

Darci,

I must admit that I am enchanted by open source concepts (input from many, and let peer review sort the wheat from the chaffe).

I think about Pema Chodron's comment on Bill Moyers Faith & Reason show (I think I've posted about this before). "...if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open and free and loving and compassionate in any situation."

Having a truly flat organization probably means giving up control (which according to Pema you never really have). It seems to be antithetical to many of our closely held beliefs on how to win. Few have the courage to take this approach, unless of course they have nothing to lose (like those crazy open sourcers).

Apologies that I have no pithy headline or simplicity rules (which I like by the way). I guess I'm just saying/agreeing that it is a hard thing to wrap your head around.

Posted by Paul Davidson at November 29, 2006 10:04 PM

How flat is your world? Here is an interesting and objective criterion.

1. "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman is No.2 in the Amazon list of 50 best-sellers for 2006. At least a critical mass of people out there suspect that the world is indeed flat. And these are the people on the leading edge.

2. Within hours of your post, people from at least two continents are part of the discussion. And every one has an URL at the end of it.

What do you think?

Jay, from Bangalore

http://ideaburger.blogspot.com

Posted by Jayakumar Hariharan at November 30, 2006 12:08 AM

Jay,

That's a great way to demonstrate the flatness! It's really simple while at the same time being really useful (and true). I guess the appropriate word to describe it is elegant.

Darci, I think this is going to be one of the greatest challenges to truly flat organisations. The traditional organisation has vested interests and power structures in place that will not be so ready to relinquish the status quo. Frankly, I don't see how they can change apart from being deliberately blown up. Either it can happen from the inside (and so the firm has a chance to continue with a new paradigm), or the market will destroy the firm (and in which case it will be too late).

Frankly, I think we will see much more of the latter.

Posted by Fredd Kambo at November 30, 2006 4:09 AM

Paul - thanks for the Pema Chodron comment - I love it. And for your kind comments about simplicity - I really do believe it is that simple. The issue of 'control' fascinates me. I don't believe managers ever really had ‘control’ anyway – it is an urban myth. The more I think about the word ‘control’ the more I dislike it so I advocate we celebrate the liberation of people who were allegedly ‘controlled.’ I read a wonderful report many years ago that was written by parents of people with a learning disability telling the story about how their children finally got the legal right to vote. That report title was ‘Make us Citizens and Watch us Grow’ – sounds appropriate to me in a management context too.

Posted by Trevor Gay at November 30, 2006 6:54 AM

Darci,
I think you’re right on with the observation that whether it’s right-side up, or upside down, we’re going to have hierarchy. The “lines” are never straight. I could make the argument (although it’s not easy for me) that hierarchies can be a good thing, if they’re the right kind of hierarchy. I think the reason most hierarchies get such a bad wrap—and they should—is the intention behind the hierarchies. My experience is that most companies weren’t built by people who loved hierarchies. They loved innovation, value-creation, entrepreneurship. As companies grow, the need for accountability increases. Somewhere along the line we made the management leap that accountability and hierarchies were somehow related. At the end of the day, hierarchies are the creations of each of us, and our need for control, power, validation, ego, etc. create hierarchies in our own minds. The necessary “zigging and zagging” stops because we create separation between ourselves and others. Maybe not a lot of separation, but enough that we believe we need to be in “control.” Martin Luther King once said that separation “gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” Whether it’s a corporation, community, or the government, the principle applies.

I see the separation leading to a one-way mindset—everyone else is a student, and those building the hierarchies are “the teachers.” In most hierarchies, “the teachers” have the first and last word, with as much stage time in between as possible. The “students” aren’t excluded from participation, but they’re not actively invited either. I think there’s a strong correlation between the size of a company’s collective ego, and the layers of unnecessary hierarchy. Peter Drucker once said that, “Intellectual arrogance often causes disabling ignorance.” I think that arrogance is part of what Fredd spoke of in his comment. pfizer canada viagra

Thanks for bringing up the topic. I think it’s a very important one.

Posted by steve smith at November 30, 2006 11:36 AM

Fire the old and bring in the young. Look at Ford. You can't have change without cutting off some heads. Move the old out or over to the operations and let them share their extensive knowledge through processes. Their in the maintenance mode of their careers so let them die in the pasture. Let the young rule (under 35).

Tom it goes back to the MBA's being taught how it should be, and org sturcture is just another one of those misaligned courses. They mean will they really do.....

Posted by Jason at November 30, 2006 1:22 PM

Darci, as you well know (because you recommended his books to me), Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, is way ahead of the curve on this one. Workforce democracy is his baby and he's pushing this one hard. My favorite quote of his, from The Seven Day Weekend: “Why do organizations and their leaders cling to a rigid form of command and control that is at odds with the values of personal freedom that they cherish?” http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works/dp/B0009S5AVW/sr=8-1/qid=1164919017/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3692636-8540150?ie=UTF8&s=books

Posted by John O'Leary at November 30, 2006 3:40 PM

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Wow! I love everybody's comments! I'm so stimulated by this conversation. To address some of them: I have talked to senior execs who absolutely have no burning desire to change their culture because they feel that, by the time the problems catch up to them, they will be sitting on the beach somewhere in Florida...

I work with organizations all the time that are wrought with hierarchy in which accountability is reserved only for management - it is exactly what is wrong with organizations today. Managers feel accountable for their employee's work. To mitigate risk, they avoid giving their employees new challenges for fear they might make a mistake and the manager gets blamed. Most people want the responsibility - they don't want to feel like children at work. Managers need to learn how to hold thier employees accountable...something most incompetent managers don't know how to do. (loved your article, Jeff).

I'm hearing that we all agree that this idea of "control" is a complete farse...the sooner managers realize they don't really have any anyway, the better off we'll all be. This need for control comes from fear (insecurity). Fear paralyzes us and most of what we fear isn't real anyway.

It's ironic that people get promoted into incompetence because they are competent. I've seen it all too many times. I've never been much for power or position - I'm more interested in the challenge. To me, it makes sense that people are given challenges to explore new talents and gain new experiences and get rewarded in some form or fashion for being successful. So, why then do individuals get promoted (pay raise included) into management before they've ever proven themselves to be effective managers? It's no wonder they don't realize they are incompetent-every two weeks their paycheck reminds them that they're good. And, people don't get invited to attend management training until they are already managers - isn't that too late? They've already got the job...why do they care about learning anything new - what are they going to get for it? A promotion????

Posted by Darci at November 30, 2006 4:02 PM

Traditional organizational structures can really work when leaders (not managers) train their subordinates to take over their position. That kind of mentoring has really been lost. I have worked in fairly flat organizations. They seem to become problematic when a "Survivor" like dependance on social networking to get things done splinters the org. and hinders performance.

Posted by Brian at November 30, 2006 6:42 PM

Jason – a very interesting comment and let me respond in a constructive and friendly way. As a 54 year old ‘boomer’ I don't feel I need to spend every day eating grass in the meadow just yet. I have only just started changing the world and I still have loads to do. 60 is the new 30 as TP puts it. It is all in the mindset. Throughout my career I've known plenty of 'under 35's' who act like they are asleep most of the time and at the same time I’ve known 70 year olds or older who might have invented the words energy and innovation. Generally it might be good to get younger people to drive change but you cannot suggest ALL ‘over 35’s’ are finished - or that under 35’s have the monopoly on good ideas or energy. We ‘oldies’ still have things to offer in the enthusiasm and energy department.

Just a thought - Did you realise you are suggesting in your comment that 28 years ago Tom Peters was among the folks, as you put it ‘in ‘the maintenance mode of their career so let them die in the pasture’? - I rest my case :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at December 1, 2006 3:05 AM

I've been away from this place for a while.
Great stuff from Trevor (both posts). I am 42 and feel I am only now really in my stride. It's about mindset, positive atttitude, and willingness to learn, and especially the self-knowledge to recognise and challenge your own preconceived ideas, personality traps and blind spots.

This from Trevor goes onto my quotes file:
"...the only point of a management structure diagram on a piece of paper is to provide some fun for the staff in finding a way to ignore it completely and just get on with their job to add value."

Happy w/e all.
regards
Michael
"We would have fewer fads if we had more knowledge"

Posted by Michael from UK at December 1, 2006 6:22 AM

I have read with some amusement the threads off of Tom's challenge/question on flatter organization. Over on Seth Godin's
blog you will find a post that makes the need for structure and hierarchy (someone has to be fired - and someone has to do the the firing!)

http://pedropais.wordpress.com/2006/11/30/poor-implementations/

But I do think flatter - getting the top of the pyramid close to the customer is better. Layers do have the advantage of allowing for growth and developement when done well.

Posted by bruce Humbert at December 1, 2006 8:00 AM

Love the Seven Day Weekend concept above - Happy December 1st - 2007 Summer of Love starts now.

1. Trevor - I know soft is hard is one of your shared visions - and it does apply but metrics, Six Sigma, calculus & project management measures are extremely important too - have a brother-in-law engineer for Boeing [787's] and they are dominating Airbus now - he MUST work at least 20 hours OT EACH week per contract - he can visit Paris & Tokyo offices [from Seattle] all he wants ... he's bored with that though.

2. I recall while getting an MBA in 1990 how Taco Bell executives worked "24/7" to take over worldwide dominance of their BRAND - sheer speed and strengh - and FLOW rather than Corporate tweaking ... they've ruled 'taco-fare' for decades.

3. Jason - "young" is being financially independent - then you can take radical risks - too many young are in debt and slaves to being conservative in action - and kissing backside because they are too scared to be real men & women ... "young" is being able to walk and say "... I'm taking my lovely freakshow to greener pastures ... life is too slow here in careless youthville ..."

Posted by sean_7_day at December 1, 2006 9:30 AM

Isn't this a bit too much of a socialized agenda for business? Why should my employees stay with my company when they know our world is flat? The strength of the market is the opportunity it presents for growth. I would offer that while the "associate" may garner a quick sense of self-determination, and could at the company's benevolence earn a slightly higher salary at first that the executive level staff and CEO will use the flat model to prevent any real upward mobility of the front line staff, thus relegating the power horse of the company to an old, worn, and wet work horse put down in a benign sense of self agrandizing compassion of the corporation taking the agonizing steps of caring for its associate.

Posted by Larry Woods at December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

Many thanks Michael - appreciate your kind comments :-)

Sean - 'metrics, Six Sigma, calculus & project management measures are extremely important too’

I agree with you - I simply don’t understand 'metrics, Six Sigma and calculus' I am comfortable with stories, anecdotes and subjectivity. I don’t deny the value of ‘hard’ - good luck to the ‘numbers folks’ - we need them desperately - but given a choice I would rather watch paint dry. Amazingly enough some of my best friends are accountants ... despite my ranting about numbers.

Posted by Trevor Gay at December 1, 2006 9:59 AM

1. Hey Trevor - the accounting can be about how you feel too of course - like owning a fine Lexus Hybrid really is about how you feel Lovemark-wise about Lexus Brand - and what it says about how cool it is - luxury Toyota high-quality - design - style [and someone did the numbers right so you earned it!]

2. Larry - to me it seems Google, Starbucks, Costco, Microsoft, Nike - and others - create the innovative career & personal life respected "campus-like career-place" that takes advantage of TALENT and human spirit to make a profit - almost no turnover saves because they carefully hire awesome TALENT!

2. And if Google was foolish enough to hire me - YES I'd be camping out in the organic nutrition dining room [wearing Maui Jim $300 titanium shades] as a 2nd office - with grandsons playing Tiger Woods 2007 in the 1st office ...

Posted by sean at December 1, 2006 10:41 AM