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Disaggregate the organization

“The challenge is to create large-scale organizations without losing human scale.”

To intercept opportunities that come and go at lightning speed, organizations must be able to quickly reconfigure capabilities, infrastructure, and resources. Unfortunately, in many organizations, rigid unit boundaries, functional silos, and political fiefdoms hamper the rapid realignment of skills and assets. Large organizational units that encompass hundreds or thousands of employees pose another danger, as they often lead to groupthink on a grand scale. To become more adaptable, companies must organize themselves into smaller units and create fluid, project-based structures.

13 Stories
43 Hacks
4 Barriers

Disaggregate the organization

“The challenge is to create large-scale organizations without losing human scale.”

To intercept opportunities that come and go at lightning speed, organizations must be able to quickly reconfigure capabilities, infrastructure, and resources. Unfortunately, in many organizations, rigid unit boundaries, functional silos, and political fiefdoms hamper the rapid realignment of skills and assets. Large organizational units that encompass hundreds or thousands of employees pose another danger, as they often lead to groupthink on a grand scale. To become more adaptable, companies must organize themselves into smaller units and create fluid, project-based structures.

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Several years ago, Company X moved away from having part-time employees in their operations and customer support departments.
Story by Josh Harrington on September 19, 2010
Working in an environment with many distributed offices and timezones and correspondingly silo'ed projects, many employees never meet talented, creative folks on other teams who can be co-conspirators
Hack by Vijay Karunamurthy on September 19, 2010
We cannot have an innovative workforce when employees cannot quit their jobs and start innovative new businesses because of the loss of medical benefits.
Barrier by Harvey Summers on September 10, 2010
An Anglican parish launches a bold experiment with a radical model of how to “do church,” by  replacing hierarchy with communities of passion, and unleashing the capabilities of its c
Story by Drew Williams on July 10, 2010
An enormous gap exists between management's ability to understand the research and their ability to successfully transition from outdated practices to more effective, people-centric models.
Barrier by Mike Tobias on July 9, 2010
Leaders can get a lot  more done if they did a lot less.  60%+ of time is wasted by top executives as the context for leadership has changed faster than our assumptions.  This hack
Hack by Nick Obolensky on June 27, 2010
If freedom means being unbound how effective is such liberation in an innovation environment?
Hack by Altaf Jasnaik on June 22, 2010
One of the challenges of faculty work is that, while there arelarge number of great faculty members out there, access to these facultymembers is limited to physical presence in the classroom; until no
Hack by Aaron Anderson on June 4, 2010

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