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 B.”  Through time and motion studies, the fastest and most efficient way to do things could be identified. To achieve these results, employees had to adhere to strict guidelines. In such an organization, decision-making was an activity that resided with management. Like military commanders, the word of managers was the guide for corporate action. This was a classic command and control model.

But in today’s world, your company is really a series of networks. These networks include both internal and external players. Knowledge is dispersed throughout the network—it is not concentrated in the managerial class. And the organization needs that knowledge to succeed. This means that a traditional hierarchical approach where knowledge and power flow from the top down will not get you the results you need. To describe this model, we borrow the image of orchestration from Peter Drucker. Read more

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 to this and it makes sense to dig in, using the approaches we outline above to understand how a network is working organically so that interventions are effective. But it is unrealistic to believe that businesses will become completely self-organizing in our lifetimes, if ever. Read more

Mapping Personal Networks

Another way to approach network analysis within your intangible capital knowledge factory is to zoom down to the level of individual workers.

One of the common ways of using this kind of map is to identify and find patterns in the interaction between groups of employees and/or groups of external people. This kind of analysis can be used to identify critical sources of knowledge, the “go-to” people to find information or solve problems. It can also be used to understand the knowledge exchanges that happen—who helps connect people together, who helps solve problems and those with specialized knowledge.
Read more

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 tomorrow).

This perspective looks at the roles people play in your organization. This is the Value Network methodology described by Verna Allee in The Future of Knowledge (still one of my favorite books on the knowledge economy and why I pursued certification in this methodology*).

This approach involves mapping a network where a specific task or process occurs. The nodes in this network are “roles.” A role speaks to the specific function that a person is playing. This is not their title on an org chart—it is usually more descriptive—such as advisor, buyer, designer, marketer, mentor, partner, problem solver. It is common for a person to serve in more than one role. Read more

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. Read more

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.  Read more

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 and ease with which networks can be formed thanks to information technology (IT). It can be hard to separate the history of the technologies that have enabled the growth and capture of knowledge from the knowledge itself. Nowhere is this relationship more clear than with networks. IT helps us create powerful connections between people and organizations. And these connections, these relationships take on a life of their own. Read more

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 the
organization chart. Like an organization chart, the triangular figure is wider
at the bottom where there are more people at the bottom working in units or on
projects. There is a management level that connects the “worker” to the
corporate or executive level. As you will see throughout the coming chapters,
the shift to the knowledge era is necessitating greater emphasis on the bottom
of this triangle. Read more

Networks Are the New Organization Charts

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Organization chart
In 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 an organization chart.
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Our understanding of organizations continues to be influenced by the organization chart (org chart for short). It is a rare company that does not have one. And they are still used as a basic tool to understand the organization and to manage personnel. Every person in every organization needs to “report” to someone to, at a minimum, facilitate communication and personal development. But the org chart is losing its value along with a company’s financial statements—neither does a very good job at explaining how value is being created in the knowledge era. The task of putting knowledge to work does not fit inside the neat models that we have used in the past. Read more

The New Management: Finding the right balance

As you probably know by now, we see the modern business as a knowledge factory. This means that all managers need to become expert in the management of a knowledge factory. There are three critical management concepts that you will need to add to your toolkit in order to get the best results possible from your knowledge factory: networks, orchestration, and innovation. Read more

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