The old systems are broken. The
Internet changed everything. Looking forward, we need to cultivate fluid
organizations, powered by innovative, multidimensional people.
I am a fan of
Steve Denning, author of
Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010) and regular contributor at
Forbes.
In his recent article, "
The Management Revolution That's Already Happening," he writes:
"In the 20th Century, firms had often been successful by
following the precepts of hierarchical bureaucracy: 'focus on making
money'; 'tell employees what to do'; 'control performance through rules,
roles, plans and reports'; and 'achieve efficiency through economies of
scale.'"
In the last quarter of the century, corollaries were added: “focus
tightly on maximizing shareholder value"; “strategy is about coping with
competition”; and “lower costs by off-shoring." These principles worked
as long as oligopolies dominated the marketplace. Firms could succeed
with limited innovation, often by copying what had already been
pioneered by others.
Then globalization and the Internet changed everything. Hierarchical
bureaucracy couldn’t cope. Attempts at achieving continuous innovation
led to unmanageable internal complexity, while attempts at limiting
innovation accelerated organizational death.
I have repeatedly argued similar points for a more than a decade now, including in a recent
Fast Company post: "
Creating a Company Designed for the Long Haul." I believe we will need to rethink how we organize and manage this creative innovation era.
It will require us to create cross-functional cross-disciplinary "
talent clusters" inside and outside of our organizations.
By now, the notion of
knowledge, innovation, and/or business cluster
has been well established for quite some time around the globe from
Silicon Valley to Southeast Asia. A business cluster is a geographic
concentration of interconnected business, suppliers, and associated
institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase
the productivity with which companies can compete, nationally and
globally. One can argue that the concepts of business clusters goes back
to the Japanese notion of
keiretsu from the 1990s.
When written in Japanese, keiretsu comprises two characters, meaning
"system" and "row." Thus the term "keiretsu" is now used more generally
to mean an alliance of companies and/or individuals that work together
for mutual benefit. It can easily be argued that giants like Toyota,
Virgin, Amazon, Disney, Apple, GE, etc. are all being led and managed on
the principles of "clusters" internally and externally.
Although the concepts of knowledge/innovation/business cluster
applied primarily outside of the organizations’ four walls, to survive
and thrive in the creative innovation economy, organizations will need
to create cross-functional
talent clusters on an
as-needed basis for creating and executing new ideas and innovation. I
have expanded these ideas in great detail in my forthcoming book with
Fast Company contributing writer and journalist
Drake Baer--
Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability (Spring 2014, McGraw Hill). Here I'd like to share some basic points:
To reach a common goal people need to work together. This act of
working together is "collaboration." And successful collaboration
requires the right people with the right information to make the right
decision.
Creating a cluster is a way to drive value-driven outcomes quickly by
assembling the right set of people regardless of their rank and file.
Since jobs are increasingly shared and people, whether in small or large
organizations, are wearing multiple hats, a cluster is a way of
structuring that fluidity. Clusters are not a traditional hierarchical
management structure. Instead, they’re multi-disciplinary,
multi-functional collaborative networks to drive optimal outcomes. They
come into being to address a particular challenge, and then dissipate to
form other networks addressing other challenges.
In old days, organizations formed SWAT teams to solve tough problems,
except in today’s constantly changing marketplace we constantly need
those SWAT teams, aka talent clusters, with fluid structure. Clusters
follow rules, just like hierarchical structures do such as
accountability, reward systems, and measurements. However, clusters are a
bottom-up structure, and they attract the resources they need, organize
themselves around an agenda, and operate through their ethos. They are
self-motivated, self-managed teams to drive vision, execute to create
value, and influence an ecosystem.
Clusters produce results in the same way a species comes to dominate
an ecological niche. Sustained biological dominance doesn’t come from a
master orchestrator, but from the ability to adapt and move more quickly
than competing species. Similarly, sustained market dominance doesn’t
come from a singular leader, but from an ability to drive talent
clusters to create an agile, resilient, and responsive organization.
Regardless of the geography or task, clusters have the following characteristics:
Tailored Agenda: Each cluster has a specific reason for existing--with an agenda of objectives that matches that purpose.
Time-bound Existence: Clusters emerge when needs arise. They disband when their objectives have been completed.
Evolving Membership: Membership to a cluster is not fixed, but is fluid, with talent and perspectives changing to suit tasks as they change.
Self-organizing Responsibility: Clusters develop their own structure and operational rules: They alone are responsible for their operation and its results.
Adaptive Ethos: The culture and personality of the cluster aligns with its purpose: Some are explorative, some are directed.
At the highest level, we can define three primary types of clusters,
each mapping onto the life cycle of a product, process, or service. They
are visioning, ecological, and implementation oriented.
Visioning Cluster: How does a product, service, or a
new process begin? Like all living things, it must be conceived. This
is the work of the visioning cluster: They sketch out the potentials of
the desired outcome.
Ecological Cluster: An organization today constantly
requires bringing new invention to market: suppliers, customers,
intermediaries, and partners to realize value from our products and
services. The ecological cluster’s primary purpose is to inspire,
influence, and support our ecosystem with our vision.
Implementation Cluster: Ideas don’t become realized
by their own free will. They need to be ushered into life by people.
Just as the visioning cluster is composed of people that affect the
conceiving of a new idea, the implementation cluster is composed of
people that affect the commercialization of a product or a service. The
agenda of the implementation cluster is to manifest the vision in the
context of the ecosystem as described by the ecological cluster.
Article Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3012598/how-talent-clusters-will-help-you-win-a-sustainable-future
04:31
SilverPeople
