Przerażony kameleon - eseje o przyszłości zarządzania - E-mentor

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Tomasz Magaj, Michał Mirowski, Andrzej Mróz, Adam Tomczak, Leszek Wojtowicz
the courier company and reported directly to telemarketing and our company in the same
manner as outlined before.
The Challenge
The problems and challenges that our company faces in the future are wholly dissimilar to those
faced by companies even 20 years ago. The service provided would have certainly been science
fiction to the general public for sure and the operational and organizational aspects of running
the business would also come close to that description. Considering what our company does
and on what scale, generating huge revenues and profits, it is difficult to imagine that it does
not have any sales people in the company, nor does it have 1 square meter of warehouse space,
nor does it have any type of infrastructure and has only 1 office that is home to no more than
a handful of employees. The major tasks for the management of this company are therefore not
related to capital management or machinery operations management, or even for that matter
human resource management. What our company faces are challenges related to relationship
management with its partners. On the outside, our company chooses to be a small firm, but
the strength of its presence on the market is the network of partners it had developed. This is
the major challenge of the future management – to establish a network of interdependent and
aligned partners working toward profit generation with minimal fixed costs on the side of the
enterprise itself.
This in effect is a new form of developed human resource management. In today’s businesses,
human capital is usually employed within, bringing with it for the employees a sense of unity with
the company. This unity and identification with the company is crucial in terms of motivating
the employees to perform in a desired manner. Within every company, different approaches to
HR are engaged in order to maximize output from the employee. All these actions undertaken
are relatively easy to monitor and develop if the employees are “the company’s”, even if the
employees are spread out in different areas of the world. However, the challenge of the future
will become to not only handle one’s own employees, but guide entire companies (partners) in
doing prescribed things for the benefit of one’s company. This approach is a relatively straightforward
solution to several problems in business, one of which are fixed costs associated with
employees and plant capital. By means of, at its simplest, outsourcing various responsibilities to
partners our company is able to maintain low fixed costs when business is slower. It maintains
a crew of specialists, facilitators and managers of the business as its fixed cost. This allows for
greater flexibility and adjustment to many situations encountered in the marketplace as well as
greater and faster mobility in decision making with regard to strategic choices.
This type of cooperation among companies can be employed if, for example, the partners
have full trust in each other and faith that each is doing the utmost for the benefit of both, or if
there are control mechanisms in place that motivate abiding by the rules. As Lenin once said,
faith in people is good, but control is better. Based on this premise, it not difficult to conclude
that an operation with such a small organization within itself (20 or so employed) could not
succeed without either a strong belief in the honesty and hard-work initiatives of its partners, or
control of the partners actions. We will propose that our company has not fully left its investments
up to faith and therefore employed the latter part of V.L.’s thought. Indeed, because of the fact
that our company operates in the not too distant future, it is able to make use of the advanced
technology available to it to control its partners and give feedback on their performance.