Orchestration Is New Command and Control
In the tangible economy, mechanization and mass production drove huge productivity gains as manufactured goods replaced those made by hand. These efficiencies came through strict discipline. Managers could describe to their employees in great detail the smartest way to accomplish their work: “Take Part A, attach these two screws then join Part A to Part [...]
Networks: A Question of Control
As with so many other aspects of knowledge assets, there are both bottom-up and top-down aspects to networks. There are many who study networks that see them as analogous to self-organizing, living systems that occur in nature. If you believe this, then you believe that organizations can organize themselves. There is a lot of truth [...]
Putting Networks to Use…in and for the organization
In all the discussions in recent weeks here on the growth of networks and organizations, it is hard to say which came first—the human or the technological connection. The shift to a knowledge economy has made it more and more attractive to connect and automate using IT and networking technologies. The rise of new forms [...]
Use Value Network maps to understand how your organization works from the bottom up
We usually look at organizational networks at three levels. The first (described as a knowledge factory) is at a strategic level, built on the high-level inventory of an organization’s intangible capital. Today, I’ll talk about the next takes the perspective of the knowledge factory down one more level of detail (third perspective, personal networks comes [...]
Thinking about your organization as a network
The Internet is one huge network. But it is also the platform on which many smaller networks can be formed. Your organization exists in and through a lot of these smaller networks as well as the meta-network of the internet.
Networks and the Organization: An Historical Context
The ability of people and organizations to connect with each other and to form networks moved into hyper-drive with the rise of the über network of our time, the Internet. Peter Drucker, one of the leading management thinkers of the last fifty years, highlighted the importance of the Internet by putting it into historical context. [...]
IT Equals IC: Networks in the Organization
In my past couple posts, I have been talking about mapping networks as the new organization chart.
The concept of networks in the organization is not new. Human beings have always found ways to connect with each other through tribes, associations, work groups and many other types of networks. What is new is the speed [...]
Horizontal or Vertical: two views of the organization—which is right?
One image that we have used over and over again in recent years to explain the managerial implications of
the knowledge era is depicted in this graphic. It is an abstraction of theorganization chart. Like an organization chart, the triangular figure is widerat the bottom where there are more people at the bottom working [...]
Networks Are the New Organization Charts
—-Organization chartIn the tangible economy, power and knowledge flowed primarily from the top down. An organization chart was used to explain how resources and authority were distributed. To show who reports to whom. What is the extent of the control of an individual manager? How are resources allocated? Just about every organization had and needed [...]
