[p2p-research] do we still need big orgs?

[Michel Bauwens]

via
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/08/why-we-need-big-organizations.html

do you agree: do we still need big orgs?



text:

"Bye, bye, organization guy." Those words start the first chapter in the
estimable Daniel Pink's Free Agent
Nation<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/12/freeagent.html>,
published in 2007. In that book, Pink observed how increasing numbers of
people in the US are choosing to work as independent contractors, temps, and
on a project-to-project basis.

Workers were leaving big corporations, Pink said, to get away from
"unfulfilling jobs, dysfunctional workplaces, and dead-end careers." As
readers of our blog <http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/>will
recognize, we see this dysfunction as the inevitable result of the
industrial-era model in which most of today's big companies remain stuck.
<http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/06/measuring-the-big-shift.html>

In the industrial-era model, companies focus on efficiency above all
else--on getting things done at the lowest cost possible. In the name of
efficiency
<http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/03/can-your-company-scale-its-lea.html>they
boil their business operations into routinized practices that suppress the
creative instincts of their workers, who become standardized parts of a
predictable machine. They not only suppress the creative instincts of their
workers, they ultimately suppress the individuals themselves. The
push-driven programs of these institutions require standardization and
predictability. But individuals, especially passionate ones, are ultimately
unique and unpredictable.

Small wonder our 2009 Shift Index
(PDF)<http://www.johnseelybrown.com/shiftindex.pdf>found that only
about 20 percent of today's workers are "passionate" about
their jobs--defined as loving what they do and working for more than just a
paycheck. The Index also found that the most passionate workers were least
likely to work for a big corporation.

Which raises a disquieting thought: will big corporations soon be filled
only with people too timid to work on their own--the bureaucrats, the
clock-watchers, and the resolutely non-talented? Will corporations slowly
crumble under their own weight as inertia overwhelms their ability to
respond to external events, and their talented people flee to become
independent agents?

On the contrary, we believe big institutions will become more relevant than
ever--once they focus not just on efficiency but on providing platforms for
individuals to systematically experiment, learn, and innovate. As scalable
learning replaces scalable efficiency big institutions will become more
appealing to talented individuals. In fact, we believe they will become an
irresistible magnet for passionate people seeking to amplify their
individual efforts to develop faster.

We can think of at least two big reasons why this will occur. First,
companies will wake up to the fact that knowledge workers--who exist at
every level of the firm--are the ones who monetize intangible assets.
Companies that don't nurture them will lose the very workers most
responsible for creating
profits.<http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy_in_an_era_of_global_giants_1689>That
compels big institutions to re-conceive their operations,
organization,
and strategy through the talent
lens<http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/03/tomorrows-talent-networks.html>,
especially as competitive pressures continue to intensify and performance
deteriorates--long-term trends documented in our recently released Shift
Index.

So, corporations increasingly need talented individuals to survive. But why
would talented individuals join or remain in large corporations? Why
wouldn't they simply strike out on their own and leverage the digital
infrastructure to connect with other individuals?

This leads to the second reason we believe that large-scale corporations
will remain a prominent feature of our professional landscape: because they
will be best positioned to develop and support scalable, long-term,
trust-based relationships. Think about it. Even the most accomplished
networker supported by social networks like Facebook can develop only a
limited number of trust-based relationships. On the other hand, a large
institution could scale these kinds of relationships far more rapidly and
broadly than any individual could.

Imagine if a well-respected, global firm decided to create the right
platform to foster these kinds of relationships, not only among its own
employees, but across a worldwide network of diverse external partners. Not
only could such a large institution get bigger but--because of the
collaboration curve<http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/04/introducing-the-collaboration.html>--it
would generate increasing returns to scale, accelerating growth for both
individuals and the firm. How could any one person, on their own, replicate
the scale of relationships such an institution would offer?

Long-term trust based relationships matter because, in the Big Shift era, tacit
knowledge<http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/01/abandon-stocks-embrace-flows.html>is
what allows all of us, individually and collectively, to keep up with
a
fast-moving, unpredictable world. Tacit knowledge, which we all have but
experience great difficulty in expressing, is typically created and
exchanged only in long-term, trust-based relationships. To access valuable
tacit knowledge, in other words, we need scalable networks of relationships,
supported by shared practices. Since people can't ever access as many
relationships on their own as they could as part of a larger institution,
they will face significant disadvantages by remaining independent.

Now, of course, this assumes a dramatic transformation in the institutions
that we have today, from institutions that flourish by suppressing
individuality to ones where individuality must flourish in order for the
institution to do the same. This will not happen overnight. But companies
will eventually awake to the opportunity--indeed the imperative--this
transition represents. Long-term competitive pressures ensure that the old
guard institutions will wither and eventually die if they don't.

>From this perspective, we believe the current flight of passionate and
talented people from institutional confines represents a transitional event
rather than a permanent shift to a "free agent nation" or "e-lance economy."
People are fleeing today because our current generation of institutions
undermines talent development in the name of efficiency. As a new generation
of institutions emerges the current flight from institutions will reverse.

Do you agree with this perspective? Could individuals develop their talent
more rapidly on their own than by participating in a new kind of institution
completely focused on talent development? What might institutions do to
build a distinctive advantage in talent development?


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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