This Fortune article says that traditional organisations are becoming less attractive as workers become more entrepreneurial and more mobile.
Their ‘Unlimited Human Potential M-Prize’ has rewarded a number of emerging new models for how to organise work:
- At Vagas, “every management process — from performance reviews and rewards to strategy — is highly participative. Rather than rigid planning and budget cycles, the rhythm of the organization is set on a rolling two-week management cycle — each team meets fortnightly to review progress. The result is a fast-growing, entrepreneurial organization.”
- Enspiral is “an entirely new kind of organization — a collective of individuals with a common ideal working on different problems with radically distributed resources, information, and control — the Enspiral team found itself tackling and disrupting just about every core management process, from decision-making and direction setting to budgeting.”
“The development of a visually engaging and flexible approach to budgeting” led to “increased transparency and surprising generosity that emerges when you involve everyone in deciding on where and how to spend resources. Just as important, it offers a short course in launching a low-risk, high-impact experiment in even the most high-stakes realm” — prototype a low tech solution, test and repeat.” - Klick Health use big data and social technology to empower and engage employees. “All Klick employees start their day by logging into Genome and spend their day connecting via its many features, [which are] designed to give the right information and tools to people at the moment they need them.”
- Similarly, “Nomatik is a clever social platform designed to extend the spirit of coworking beyond actual coworking spaces, to engineer productive matches between individual talents and organizations, and to reimagine the boundaries of the organization in the process.”
“In this creative, disruptive economy, your share of profits is a function of your share of differentiation, which is a function of your share of creativity.”
“The old question was: How do we get people to serve the organisation’s goals? The new question is: How do we create a sense of community so compelling that people are willing to bring their greatest gifts to work every day?”
The common themes? Reduced hierarchy, maximum collaboration, making more social, and enabling individual impact in a big company. A shift from control to enablement and facilitation. And LOTS of enabling technology.
“The organizations and leaders who figure out the most clever and compelling ways to connect people and organizations will be the real winners in the creative economy.”
“What the future of work looks like”, Polly LaBarre, Fortune, 29 May 2014