The Age of the Network is a harbinger of a pervasive, global organizational shift, a metatrend that points toward other signs near at hand. Your organization is as different from the one your parents worked in as it is from the ones our children will inhabit. Networking takes us in five new directions, each an outgrowth of one of the five principles. Keep your eyes on these indicators of the future to help you navigate your journey into the 21st century.
The Age of the Network organization needs to be smarter than its predecessors, because the ride into the 21st century is going to be very fast indeed. Bureaucracy creates cadres of specialists who only know their own particular little bailiwicks. Hierarchy limits access to information with its one-way, top-down stream of command and control. Networks increase communication, multiply information, and bring people into the loop.
Most people want their lives to matter. They want to be part of organizations that engage and learn, where they can see the effect of their achievements, where they have a sense of belonging. It is possible to make a difference in networks, to bring your whole self to work, and to narrow the schism between your "life" and your "work."
Still networks are hardly without problems. "You asked me about my `most difficult networking problem,'" wrote (in an e-mail message, of course) Gunther Singer, an Austrian automotive consultant who spent the previous five years flattening a multinational company by launching 60 self-managing groups. "It's the power field where two different systems, ideas, or even paradigms meet. It is the tension between the teamnet/virtual project versus the built-for-eternity hierarchy."
There is no organizational nirvana where everyone sublimely persists in eternal harmony. If there were, it would be boring and ineffective. "Networks don't just tolerate conflict," anthropologist Virginia Hine wrote in the 1970s. "They depend on it." Conflict stems from differences of opinion, which are healthy and cause growth.
A story of collaboration and conflict, internal warfare and kindred communities within the high tech industry gave birth to thousands of companies in the 1980s. People with a new idea that their own company wouldn't fund started another one, from which still some other group eventually split, forming its own company, and so it went.
Networks allow you to build on what you have. They enhance your relationships with suppliers, anticipate customer needs, and allow entry to new markets with the competition. Don't throw out your hierarchy and bureaucracy. You need them. By clearly defining their places in the organizational universe, you help them to do better what they do best.
Purpose as a Natural ResourceAs radical change prevails for the foreseeable future, organizations either will create their own futures or find themselves reacting to the change driving them. After the wave of interest in reengineering passes, organizations will shift emphasis from managing "costs" to focusing on real business growth. However, it will be tougher than ever to create breakthrough products, enter new markets, and achieve high-performance operations. Facing limits to growth, organizations will reach optimal size, then seek qualitative development rather than quantitative growth. Eventually, people will come to realize that their core business purpose is an actual natural resource that gives them power in the marketplace.
Focus on PeopleTeam implementations will continue to fail at alarming rates, despite good intentions, unless organizations remove the existing impediments to corporate trust-outmoded reward systems, obsolete status symbols that split people into "haves" and "have-nots," and out-of-touch management practices. Companies will need to reinstill loyalty and motivate their people anew to do incredibly innovative work after downsizing. But people are only human. Individuals will rebel against the unending, ever-increasing demand for higher levels of performance.
The Technology of Social CapitalPhysical links will continue to explode-from one-to-one to many-to-many-into "digital convergence" at or about the year 2001. Companies will have to learn how to share important information with all employees and some key information with customers and suppliers to be smarter. Just catching up to the learning organization? Rev it up; we'll be moving on to the "fast learning organization." Before long, people actively will create social capital as a new source of wealth. This dynamic new approach to economic development will begin slowly, then suddenly catch on as success stories accumulate, reaching critical mass at the century's turn.
A new style of leadership is emerging as old-fashioned, just-do-as-I-say hierarchy fails to perform across company lines. Meanwhile, those to be led are of a different ilk. A new generation of leaders is being groomed that comes from a much more diverse pool, bringing vast cultural differences with them. New jobs and coordinating leadership roles are being invented to manage the burgeoning, bewildering webs of connections and relationships. Not surprisingly, the top will be the last to truly team and some executives will continue to be embarrassments to their corporate change efforts.
The Strange Benefit of Hierarchy
Layer cutting just for the sake of reducing cost will destroy organizations. Likewise, a completely flat organization will be equally ineffective; networks of teams work best across multiple levels. Together, they generate more holistic, integrated views than the single solution approaches to management, which are on their way out.
The Age of the Network includes all that has gone before, reshapes it, and brings a new spirit and set of capabilities to organizations of every human kind and size.
