What does the perfect organizational culture look like? Is it people working diligently in cubes, lined up like machines putting out predictable products and services neatly and efficiently? Absolutely not, because the control, predictability, and commodity nature of products and services will not exist an any sustainable way. Unless a firm is making a very stable, high demand, or high volume product it will not make any sense to create complex commodity systems to produce commodity-like products. In addition, even if you make a commodity product, even lots of them, your customer can pick up the phone and call China to have this product eagerly made for a fraction of the price. As more commodity shops are created abroad in the name of efficiency and price, the more reliance on professional, service-oriented, and “design” as the Danial Pink suggested in his book, A Whole New Mind (2006). We can argue if these assertions are real later, but it is relevant to assume that there are primary shifts to commodity products going abroad.
So, if we are a firm in the US, and making hundreds of thousand of lets say, Software code, what is our firm’s culture? Probably a cool environment, flexible work schedule, bring our dog to work, and all that “nice” pop culture business superficial benefit stuff. But, we are probably working in a cube farm, with a supervisor presenting and measuring our work, and things are good. People probably work their schedule, with about 10% of the staff really doing all the work, and fewer being creative, and fewer even interacting with the customer. Then we get word that our biggest customer just left because the code we produce can be written of half the price in Asia… we’re screwed, regardless of the fact we can bring our dog to work. Now what…
Now it’s time for a new culture, and it has nothing to do with bringing Rudy (my dog) to work. For a decade I have been thinking on the work of Charles Handy. He prognosticated a professional portfolio worker culture, in which each person has their own brand, ownership of their own career, and no one has a boss. Rather, we all have customers. This almost idealistic concept of work seemed impossible to me as I thought through the realities of how we organize ourselves, communicate with each other, and live in a work world that only cares about the bottom line.
I remember sitting in my graduate school OD (Organizational Development) class 15 years ago, when the professor drew a circle on the white board and told us that this would be the new organizational structure. I liked it, I was attracted to it, it looked like freedom, collaboration, communities of practice, and good team work. I craved it. I tried to think on it, incorporate it in my own work place, and tinkered with the idea of a circle of peers working like a real team to get things done. Then, the reality that it didn’t work, and could not work, came to light when I did not get a promotion I deserved because I was “not political enough”. Interesting…because one is working in this new model of the organization, acting as a pure team player, I was losing opportunities within a company that spoke about the future, but really existed in a traditional and hierarchical structure. People who had the power of role were still controlling everything and not allowing true creativity to get out of control. Okay, then I wondered what things would really need to happen for this new open structure thinking to take hold. I now think I see the answer, and its all around us today and beginning to take hold. It lies in our social business culture.
Specifically, social networking technology is equalizing power, slowly eating away at hierarchical structures, allowing true creativity to emerge from everywhere. Every person has access to everyone else, all information is at our finger tips, and a new kind of worker is emerging…Handy’s portfolio worker is becoming a reality. As we continue to go down the path of Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn, and the hundreds of other social and communication tools, the future of everything is changing, including how we organize for work. The code farm goes away, and the code company needs to find a new niche, needs to compete differently, and needs to reinvent itself, perhaps constantly, to successfully evolve…
Russ