Przerażony kameleon - eseje o przyszłości zarządzania - E-mentor

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Adam Morawski
a decentralized company will have to depend largely on its intrinsic intelligence. It appears at
this time that the only form of organization capable of inherent intelligence, of learning by itself
and controlling itself is a neuron network.
It is also obvious that many of today’s cutting edge organizations lean towards neuron network-like
structures, where a consensus of sorts must be reached by several units before a final
decision is made (apparently almost by default) jointly by a number of units, none of which
possess decision-making authority by themselves. Individual corporate functions are divested
from the headquarters, both functionally and geographically. Non-core activities are outsourced
from highly specialized third-party vendors. This in turn leads to fuzzy organizational limits – it
becomes increasingly more difficult to tell when one organization ends and another begins.
Organizations do not only overlap, they tend to actually penetrate or permeate each other
around the edges. It is not inconceivable that the future company will evolve entirely away
from the corporate reporting structure as we know it today, and will focus more on a somewhat
informal stakeholder – I rather than the stockholder–based organization. It is no accident that
60 percent of billion plus dollar companies believe that by the year 2010 their organizations
will be virtual corporations, even though the definition of the expression virtual corporation
may still be somewhat fuzzy.
Such a loosely organized, intrinsically intelligent, partially self-governing organization doesn’t
apparently need much of a leader... or does it? I think that it will, even more so than today’s
rigidly structured organizations do. Top executives will be needed for two reasons. The first one
is that today’s top executives will make sure that they will be needed tomorrow.
Today’s executives are generally more conservative than the organizations they lead; they
are often among the most conservative members of their organizations. By analogy, I propose
that the future organization will be led by a person in the 80 th -90 th percentile of conservatism
in their company. Therefore, I believe, the future executive will not be that much unlike today’s
upwardly mobile, ambitious, and aggressive corporate maverick in his/her thirties to early-forties.
In fact, it will be precisely from this group that future CEO’s will actually come.
Today’s executives are in control now and they are unlikely to relinquish this control without
a major fight. It is no accident that during the Chrysler/Daimler Benz merger it was discovered that
American executives make ten times the German executives’ salaries. In America money means
power, while in Germany power relates much more to position. American rankings tend to focus
on money, while German on influence, size, etc. But the top executives everywhere make sure
they control what it takes to have power, the extent of which cannot for this reason be measured
by one single measure. As they go about gathering immense amounts of power in their hands,
they age and for all practical purposes they become more and more conservative. These executives
are now building the organizations for the future–learning, virtual, fuzzy organizations with
solid, relatively inert and well entrenched tops, small but very heavy; not unlike pyramids with
perfect solid metal tetrahedrons on top, and loosely organized piles of rough-shaped Styrofoam
blocks towards the bottom. The fuzziness, flexibility, and adaptability are on the bottom, while
the heavy top determines the shape of the whole. (Rudimentary engineering says that a heavy,
small object must be supported on a structure fanning out towards the bottom, the most efficient
version of which is a pyramid, or tetrahedron. Anything else we add to it, for example, to make
it into a cube, will simply be – from the structural point of view – extraneous).
Consequently, today’s CEO’s are paving the way for their heirs apparent to take over when
they retire. They are setting up the organizations they control to need men and women not
that much unlike themselves.