Przerażony kameleon - eseje o przyszłości zarządzania - E-mentor

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Tomasz Magaj, Michał Mirowski, Andrzej Mróz, Adam Tomczak, Leszek Wojtowicz
When thinking about the “future organization” it needs to be noted that our approach was
not to imagine what we thought the world would look like in say 20 or 50 years. That position
would have brought us to the level of trying to match the imagination of Alodous Huxley and
the paper could be classified under science fiction in a creative writing class. In developing
the structure of the future organization we were therefore limited by our pragmatic approach
to maintain a semblance of reality of the organization yet at the same time daring to think of
a brave new… organization. Taking the “classical” approach, therefore, we will first see how the
organization of the future is structured and how it can function in a ultra-competitive business
environment. We will then go on to describe “our company,” an organization functioning with
success despite having little assets on the balance sheet and on the payroll. Finally, we will tie
this all into the challenges that lie ahead and the benefits of modern technology.
Organizational inter-dependence – then
Over the centuries the model of the workplace changed, sometimes less sometimes more.
The change brought on by the industrial revolution however, was significant because brought
together in one place – the factory – many workers who would perform similar tasks all with
the aim of producing a product that was a finished good made up of components ordered by
the factory – raw materials – and either assembled on the spot or otherwise utilized to create
a product comprised of the raw inputs. This revolution saw the advent of suppliers and created
a supply chain, with the factory being a passage for the raw materials to pass through on route
to the retailers and ultimately the consumer. This was a fairly simple road in the sense that it was
straight: goods came into the factory in a parallel fashion from suppliers and went out in a linear
fashion to the buyers. In this construct the suppliers acted as “feeders” of raw materials to the
factory, more often than not unaffected by each other’s actions and not able to influence the
strategy of the factory. The factory placed an order, they supplied. On the finished product side
the story was much the same. The stores or other outlets for the goods produced ordered from
the factory the produced goods and were shipped out to be sold. The players in the scheme
were connected in a supply chain and were independent of each other, more often than not
ignorant of each other’s existence and free from each other’s influence.
Organizational inter-dependence – now and…
This was the typical picture of a typical organization’s chain of production and supply, oversimplified
yet fairly accurate. With that in mind, let us jump into the future, not too distant, and
see how an organization (the future factory) in a particular field would behave. As we began the
discussion with Forbes’ praise for the internet, we shall evaluate the challenges of tomorrow on
the example of a 21 st century company using the internet in ways that were not available to the
factory-owner and were probably not realistic to think of even 15 years ago.
Our model of the future is based on a company providing a service, voice transfer, over the
internet. Already today this is not and astonishing feat, as there are a few companies on the market
already doing so. What makes this company unique is the organization structure and its utilization
of the network and web built around it. Its chain or network of suppliers, service providers and
what it in reality sells and how it works make the example of a very interesting case model.