Gary Hamel, an American management expert, in this conversation with James Franklin, Dell’s VP of IT, compares organizations with the Internet.
Gary compares organizations, which are built from a centralized core, to the internet that has no core, but just a wide periphery. The web, he says, is more engaging, innovative, interactive, and adaptable than any organization could be. These qualities of the web are what the organizations today should strive to achieve. The organizations should go from being built on a centralized architecture to an end to end architecture approach, like the Internet.
Talking about hierarchies, the management guru says that most companies have a top-down communication, while the internet interaction is more bottom-up. It is often, the person who posts on a website talking to the owner of the website. This again, is something that organizations could learn from.
Having grown up using the Internet, the employees of the generation next, look at the Web as ”an operation system of their lives”. The first expectation of this generation is a healthy competition of ideas to select a winner using a discussion based approach. Second, would be credentials taking a backseat while contribution is given preference. To attract the best and the brightest people, Gary says, the organizations’ internal reality should reflect the social reality on the Internet, as that would be their third important expectation, and what they would relate to.
The Internet is not only a platform for organizations, but also a source of learning. It is up to the small businesses to harness this source as an important resource. The first step would be to have a website and get a web content writer or a content writing service provider to kick start the bottom-up interaction, and widen the organization’s periphery.