How - Dov Seidman [16]
In place of the nice, tidy company-as-city-state, the population of corporations more closely resembles a Central American rainforest. Tall, old-growth trees define the greater geography while vines twist this way and that, connecting one tree to another, to a bush, to the ground. Lichen and moss grow in patches everywhere, often on top of one another. Bushes, fungi, saplings, and parasites abound. Flowers sprout, often in unpredictable places, as countless species of birds, bugs, and animals find a home in its dark, fertile recesses. The forest has subsumed the stone fortress of businesses, leaving in its place an organic ecosystem filled with possibility. Not only don’t your co-workers wear the blue suits, but some, who work from the privacy of their homes, work in pajamas. Traditional ways of categorizing people have gone away, along with the traditional ways of reaching out and communicating organizational goals and values to them. Few give or receive inflexible marching orders; many more of us must navigate day to day on our own. The workforce has become an ecosystem comprised of mutually reinforcing independent agents. An ecosystem, by definition, interacts or it does not survive. To thrive in a business ecosystem, you must be able connect with those in it—one way or another—as never before.
Returning to our organization-as-stadium metaphor, a Wave must work with everybody in the stadium. Full-time employees are like season ticket holders, with a significant investment in the success of the team, and that stake might be sufficient motivation for them to participate in your Wave. Others—consultants or on-site contractors, say—might completely depend on what you pay them, and they, too, might stand up when you ask. But there are many people, five rows down, who do not and will not. They depend on other things. Some came just for this one game. They might have a lesser stake, or even competing interests. Some might be cheering for the visiting team. They can all stop your Wave. If all non-season ticket holders refused to get up with your Wave, you might be left standing and raising your arms alone.
Organizations have always been constituted of complicated interrelationships of mutual interest. Today, however, we have both thinner and thicker bonds with our various shareholders, stakeholders, and partners. They are thinner because the diverse types of relationship and connection we form with suppliers, freelancers, part-timers, outsourcers, free agents, and cooperative partners are no longer strong enough on their own to impel total cooperation. They are thicker in the degree to which we now may depend on these bonds to achieve critical goals. Despite newly complicated and quickly evolving relationships, we still need to reach out and connect with our related communities in a way that can unite us in a common goal, to make a Wave powerful enough to sweep up and unite the many competing interests in play.
DISTANCE UNITES US
Business in the information age is complicated not only by the myriad new forms of relationship upon which it is built, but also by the increasing remoteness of those with whom we build it. The philosopher David Hume once said that the moral imagination diminishes with distance. 1 By this he meant you don’t feel the same sense of connection or obligation to someone halfway across the world that you do to someone halfway across the room, halfway across town, or even halfway across the country. In fact, our personal survival systems