There is hope, and the promise of at least partial liberation from the tyranny of time constraints. Why? Because the long-term interests of individuals and smart companies are aligned. To compete, successful corporations will have to make it easier and less time-consuming for their employees to collaborate. They will learn how to live with fewer time-sapping meetings and unnecessary feedback loops—or find themselves outrun by more nimble competitors. The eventual result: less frustration for knowledge workers.
Moves in this direction are already under way as savvy companies analyze their internal social networks and identify bottlenecks. Intel Corp., for example, sees an opportunity in creating technology that lowers the time cost of teamwork. And others, such as Eli Lilly & Co., are providing more corporate support for both internal and external networks. “It’s a new mental model for how you run a company,” says McKinsey’s Bryan. “The winners will be those who can handle more complexity.”
At the same time we may see a rise in new forms of Web-based organizations where people can contribute without having their time eaten up by existing hierarchy. Blogs, collaborative online databases (called wikis) and open-source software development all use the Net to handle much of the coordination among people rather than relying on top-down command and control. Such a shift to a digital spine could eventually lessen bureaucratic time burdens on over-worked professionals, especially those in such high-cost industries as health care.
Even high pay can’t compensate for unrelenting time pressure. Top managers have to realize that encouraging networks and collaboration demands as much attention and resources as supervising and measuring performance in traditional ways. Most companies have built up large human-resources departments, but few have a department of collaboration. “Most managers don’t manage social networks effectively,” says Babson’s Davenport.
At Intel, the drive to reduce the time spent sharing knowledge and collaborating is an outgrowth of efforts to better coordinate far-flung operations that stretch from Israel to India. One idea being pursued by Luke Koons, director for information and knowledge management, is “dynamic profiling”—technologies that automatically summarize areas on which a researcher or a manager is focusing, based on the subjects of their e-mails and Web searches. Such a regularly updated profile could make it less time-consuming to locate potential collaborators and resources, an especially daunting prospect in a large, innovation-minded company such as Intel. Equally important, dynamic profiling doesn’t force individuals to spend hours manually updating their profiles as their focus changes.
1. How can the organization structure facilitate speed, collaboration, and teamwork? Contrast traditional bureaucratic organizations with the examples in this case.
2. What is meant by a Web-based organization? How does this fit into the various organization theories discussed in the first part of the chapter?
3. Are there any downside risks inherent in the way the firms are organized in this case? What do you think the future will be for organization designs?
