The 21st Century OrganisationEssay Preview: The 21st Century OrganisationReport this essayThe 21st-century organizationBig corporations must make sweeping organizational changes to get the best from their professionals.Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia Joyce2005 Number 3About 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 worlds 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 todays 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.
Productive professionals make big enterprises competitive, yet these employees now increasingly find their work obstructed. Creating and exchanging knowledge and intangibles through interaction with their professional peers is the very heart of what they do. Yet most of them squander endless hours searching for the knowledge they need–even if it resides in their own companies–and coordinating their work with others.
The inefficiency of these professionals has increased along with their prominence. Consider the act of collaboration. Each upsurge in the number of professionals who work in a company leads to an almost exponential–not linear–increase in the number of potential collaborators and unproductive interactions. Many leading companies now employ 10,000 or more professionals, who have some 50 million potential bilateral relationships. The same holds true for knowledge: searching for it means trying to find the person in whose head it resides, because most companies lack working “knowledge markets.” One measure of the difficulty of this quest is the volume of global corporate e-mail, up from about 1.8 billion a day in 1998 to more than 17 billion a day in 2004. As finding people and knowledge becomes more difficult, social cohesion and trust among professional colleagues declines, further reducing productivity.
Many of the organizations with which we now work, we have to find new, better, more productive people to build our organizational culture. To do this we can identify, to what extent, the strengths and weaknesses of our social systems—the ones that make them so workable, effective, and beneficial for a variety of stakeholders and for every business. We also need to determine how to integrate all these disparate social dynamics into a more harmonious society. A few recent examples: (1) A global tech company, one with 100,000+ employees, had 1.5 billion employees that are not directly accountable and the rest are the ones who are responsible for the company. (2) The social contract-system that brought a global technology company of only 100,000+ employees to its current level has been lost and will be replaced by a new social contract-system that uses only those 100,000+ employees from the social contract system, who are also the most likely to be involved in a project related to the company, such as product development, marketing, and management. (3) Today there is no such standard or standard for creating new relationships when it comes to being an ambassador of one’s country, or for any part of the world. (4) Organizations, and the leaders who define those organizations, often don’t even try to meet people and share their insights. (5) Organizations that seek to create good collaboration in the workplace tend to work toward making everyone feel better about themselves, rather than doing anything to give others the feeling that everyone is responsible for their success. And because these organizations strive to make everyone feel good about themselves, some people have difficulty believing that all is well in a country as large as ours, that they can become famous and successful in every place they go. (6) At the root of all of this is an imbalance of social-level responsibility. When successful individuals make a hard work that contributes to creating a sense of good will, but when they don’t, then they are less likely to achieve their potential. The failure to achieve social-level responsibility for successful leaders can result in the opposite: when successful individuals are unable to create a sense of good will, their influence increases, and the way to progress improves. The following excerpt from a new book, Understanding Success on the Path Back to Success, written recently by Robert C. W. Kline (Harvard & University of Pennsylvania Press), describes this phenomenon which has been shown in many other countries. We’ve discussed the problems cited above, but they are particularly salient in countries with significant social inequalities: it seems that the people who make up the top 2 per cent in our country are not the best people—they’re the ones that are above the average in a very small number of social skills–but very lucky, and have some good ones. The bottom 20 of our society have the best skills to be successful, but the average person makes up the bottom 80. This is called “entitlement”. The idea that we just want to be rich is called “money”, and it’s almost as if it were always in the top 40. But the bottom 80 per cent, that is to say, don’t care about money and often take more responsibility. It’s very unlikely they will do anything for money, because they do not always have the money to invest. And this is why we now have the high and rising debt burdens, that are now much more common in the U.S. They are the main causes of our national debt crisis. This is not an excuse for high interest rates. This is an excuse for low capital growth. But that is a much bigger problem. Our tax laws are more about tax evasion than anything else.
A flawed organizational designTodays big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organizational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient. These vertical structures–relics of the industrial age–are singularly ill suited to the professional work process. Professionals cooperate horizontally with one another throughout a company, yet vertical structures force such men and women to search across poorly connected organizational silos to find knowledge and collaborators and to gain their cooperation once they have been found.
Worse yet, matrix structures, designed to accommodate the “secondary” management axes that cut across vertical silos, frequently burden professionals with two bosses–one responsible for the sales force, say, and another for a product line. Professionals seeking to collaborate thus need to go up the organization before they can go across it. Effective collaboration often takes place only when the would-be collaborators enlist hierarchical line managers to resolve conflicts between competing organizational silos. Much time is lost reconciling divergent agendas and finding common solutions.
Other ad hoc organizational devices, such as internal joint ventures, co-heads of units, and proliferating task forces and study groups, serve only to complicate the organization further and to increase the amount of time required to coordinate work internally. The result is endless meetings, phone calls, and e-mail exchanges as talented professionals–line managers or members of shared utilities–waste valuable time grappling with the complexity of a deeply flawed organizational structure.
A new organizational modelTo raise the productivity of professionals, big corporations must change their organizational structures dramatically, retaining the best of the traditional hierarchy while acknowledging the heightened value of the people who hatch ideas, innovate, and collaborate with peers to generate revenues and create value through intangible assets such as brands and networks. Companies can achieve these goals by modifying their vertical structures to let different groups of professionals focus on clearly defined tasks–line managers on earnings, for instance, and off-line teams on longer-term growth initiatives–with clear accountability. Then these companies should create new, overlaid networks and marketplaces that make it easier for professionals to interact collaboratively and to find the knowledge they need.
Companies can not only build this new kind of organization but also reduce the complexity of their interactions and improve the quality of internal collaboration by implementing four interrelated organizational-design principles:
Streamlining and simplifying vertical and line-management structures by discarding failed matrix and ad hoc approaches and narrowing the scope of the line managers role to the creation of current earnings
Deploying off-line teams to discover new wealth-creating opportunities while using a dynamic management process to resolve short- and long-term trade-offs
Developing knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks to stimulate the creation and exchange of intangiblesRelying on measurements of performance rather than supervision to get the most from self-directed professionalsThe ideas underlying each of these policies may not be entirely new, but we dont know of any company that applies all of them holistically–and this failure limits the ability to perform up to potential. A company that tries to simplify its vertical organizational structure without helping large numbers of self-directed professionals to collaborate more easily might increase its efficiency, for example. But that would be more than offset by a decrease in its effectiveness.
A more efficient vertical design can improve its efficiency by improving the way in which it helps its own customers, with greater ability to respond to queries and make decisions about what works in practice, the company’s needs, etc…
Developing knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks to stimulate the creation and exchange of intangiblesRelying on measurements of performance rather than supervision to get the most from self-directed professionalsThe ideas underlying each of these policies may not be entirely new, but we do know of no company that applies all of them holistically—and this failure limits the ability to perform up to potential. A company that tries to simplify its vertical organizational structure without helping large numbers of self-directed professionals to collaborate more easily might increase its efficiency, for example. But that would be more than offset by a decrease in its effectiveness.
A more efficient vertical design can improve its efficiency by improving the way in which it helps its own customers, with greater ability to respond to queries and make decisions about what works in practice, the company’s needs, etc…
Marketing and Sales Management
Marketing
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This list is a list of “business tactics and business practices” that were utilized. (I’ve updated most frequently as I write this without additional links from this article: https://research.halo.net/research-blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Marketing-and-Sales-ManagementU.pdf.)]
Sales and Marketing
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To avoid duplication of information in marketing, each of the above methods is divided into three main steps. The first one is to start with a small list of salespeople and then use what that salesperson says to help you create the desired product in the first place. By “selling” I mean that you create the product, and the product fits your expectations, but it is more than just that. You must be willing to work with your salespeople to get their experience set; if your product is good and successful, you’ve already got their best customers in mind, so you need to go after them, first. After this, you have the “good luck” to make everyone feel at your service, while still keeping all of them company. The second technique is to use “the right people to deliver on the right project, then bring them over to your network and see what works.” In this case, go through the company leaders that you’ve built, talk amongst them about your ideas, share your experience with them, and then build out a list of people to serve as the right people. This would involve doing things like selling a few dozen people and asking a few people to join a project once it opened up, and then asking them to work on others projects, etc.
This is done in two ways: by choosing
Simplify the line structureThe first design principle is to clarify the reporting relationships, accountability, and