How - Dov Seidman [14]
Friedman’s macroeconomic and social analysis of our newly “flat,” interconnected world presents a vision of the forces reshaping global business in the twenty-first century. The free flow of information significantly changes the way internal business units perform and are governed, and how individuals work together every day. Fading away are the days of the vertical silo model, when departments and programs within a corporation ran independent fiefdoms organized in top-down, command-and-control hierarchies in the spirit of feudal systems. Increasingly, our typical workday involves relating to people of relatively equal status in an ever-evolving array of teams and partnerships between units throughout the globe. Since knowledge allows people to act, companies that can instantly deliver more high-value information to their workers can enable more of them to act on it.
Companies are flattening, like our world, so that many activities that were once the province of one department are now everyone’s job. In 2005, for example, Computer Associates International, Inc., a company struggling to rehabilitate itself after being tainted by scandal, product deficiencies, and management problems, eliminated all 300 of its customer advocate positions worldwide.7 CEO John Swainson explained that the goal was to make the company’s sales workers “more accountable,” but the underlying message was clear: Advocating for the customer is no longer the special responsibility of customer advocates; it is now a part of everyone’s job description.8 In company after company, managers are eliminating so-called “Centers of Excellence” and “Centers of Innovation,” making these jobs the province of all workers. Everyone now must increase company excellence and everyone must innovate. How can you make a Wave of innovation if only the 20 or so people in your Skunk Works stand up?
As traditional job silos break down and become horizontal, command-and-control hierarchies begin to lose their relevance. A new model emerges: connect and collaborate. To succeed in this new model, workers and companies alike need to develop new skills and harness new powers within themselves. Companies—and the people who comprise them—need to recontextualize how they do business. Individuals must develop new approaches to the sphere of human relations. Both companies and employees must learn to share in whole new ways.
The world has become even more like the game of chess. Every piece on a chessboard is highly specialized, with virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, assets and liabilities. Some move diagonally and some move straight; some roam free and unfettered while others are tightly regimented. But, with a few exceptions, you can’t typically achieve checkmate with fewer than three pieces. Most accomplishments in chess are team-based; only when you position pieces properly—and in communication with one another—do they start to win. Two rooks, if communicating, are very powerful, even if they are very far apart; without close communication, rooks are far less powerful. Business is now much more like that. Success depends on how people of diverse backgrounds and skills communicate with and complement one another. In a connected world, power shifts to those best able to connect.
Six hundred years ago, people succeeded with barter arrangements on street corners. Today, most business takes place in formalized organizations; a corporation, for the most part, is nothing more than a society of individuals who share a common interest to get something done. (The corporation itself is for the most part a legal fiction. Many of them are incorporated in Delaware, but few