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Technology and the Organization
EVOLVING TOWARD SIMPLICITY

Originally published in the Journal of American MENSA, February, 1996

Prophets and pundits have confidently said it of every new communications advance — the telephone, radio, TV, fax, cell phone and Internet browser. “It will change human experience as we know it.” In 1948 a literary forecaster, British novelist George Orwell, predicted that governments would use new surveillance and propaganda technologies to enslave citizens. Fortunately, he was wrong.

Actually, Orwell got it backward. Digital technology is not imposing oppressive bureaucracy but restoring a bygone social order — a simpler one. Far from shackling individuals, computers are liberating us. Ultimately, every aspect of our lives will be simplified to the same degree that we permit ourselves to become Wired. The sooner we embrace the idea of the individual as a node on the network, the freer we’ll be to exploit the possibilities of universal connectedness. Perhaps the first great change to our daily lives is visible in the ways we work.

Rather than create or reinforce structure in the workplace, the communications revolution is helping to tear it down. In general terms, large, rigidly hierarchical organizations will be the victims of the digital world, not its masters. Nowhere is this more clear than in the former Soviet Union. Although it may still be possible to meet an ordinary someone on the streets of Moscow whose views of America are hopelessly warped by propaganda, today the Orwellian Pravda is quite dead. Gone is the central fountain from which the populace sipped its ideology.

Orwell’s vision was cloudy, but what can we see ahead to the future of oranizations? That the middleman, the go-between, will become extinct. The intermediary is doomed: technology strips him of effectiveness. This flattening of the vertical order, the sawing of corporate ladders into step stools, is already clear to the unfortunate casualties of down-sizing. But its liberating potential (both to the corporation and the individual) is still not widely grasped.

Consider two great companies, AT&T and IBM. Each in its turn was exhaustively investigated by federal antitrust squads determined to find some brooding un-American evil. AT&T got hacked to pieces, though IBM was left intact. It is no accident that the severed limbs of AT&T have thrived while IBM, whose body corporate was spared, has struggled to shed its well known bureaucracy. Or ponder Airbus Industrie, the huge European conglomerate that builds commercial jets. Edzard Reuter, Chairman of its supervisory board, recently confessed an astonishing fact: that he could not determine whether the company was profitable or not. As it turns out, Airbus is run by sixty-six separate committees. Sixty-six! With such a complex structure, is it any wonder Airbus is having trouble competing against the likes of a newly-lanky Boeing.

This sort of thinking may have to be kicked around for a few more years yet before the popular opinion echoes what the management theorists already believe. Yet again, less is more. When companies divest, they prosper. When companies combine, they falter. Managers are quickly learning this. But the cycle will only be complete when employees have learned to equate not only job security, but also personal job fulfillment, with smaller organizational structures.

Unfortunately, too many workers are still organized in ways that could only be admired inside Airbus — or the Politburo. In the coming age though, as they learn the lessons of fallen corporate Goliaths, great companies will have at least one common trait. They will shun steep and bureaucratic structures that stand in the way of productive (and satisfying) work. They will prefer letting small teams of people focus on a few simple objectives.

On the surface one might think that a behemoth like Microsoft must be on the verge of collapse under decaying levels of useless management and stock-rich fat-cats. But actually, the Seattle software giant would better serve as an example of how to do it right. Microsoft employees have long been tightly organized into tiny teams. Within the company, teams are given specific, achievable tasks; just as within the teams, individuals are charged with an appropriate degree of responsibility that offers the opportunity to reach personal excellence. Can it be a coincidence that such progressive management is flourishing within what is perhaps the most thoroughly-wired workplace in the world?

But in order to properly ponder the questions: “Why do simpler organizations accomplish more?” and “How does facilitating internal communications help?”, one must lift the veil of human inter-relationships, probe the psychology of power and motivation. The new corporate structure is likened more to a network than to the traditional ladder, with its discernible rungs of hierarchical power. Under the old system, both managers and managed were handicapped by the very structure that defined their relationships. Managers were insulated from those people with whom they ought be seeking the most intimate communication. And employees, often prevented from interacting with anyone but a direct supervisor, could easily lose sight of basic corporate, or even departmental objectives. The question: “How do I fit in to what this organization is doing?” could as easily plague the mind of a senior manager as that of a mail room clerk.

There’s evidence of this kind of isolation in more than just the way managers and employees interact. Typically, the spoils of promotion have included the corner office, access to a vaunted washroom, or even relocation to another (management-only) floor. All changes which alienate. But more and more, companies are shedding the traditional separations between “leaders” and “followers”. In fact, the words themselves smack of obsolescence.

In an organizational structure that behaves more like a network than a ladder, leadership shifts with expertise and ability. Relationships become linear, more collaborative. The definition of power is dramatically re-worked. According to consultant Jessica Lipnack, author of the book The Age of the Network, “In a network, all you have is influence. Influence and extensive shared commitment to a purpose.” Savvy managers are eschewing closed-door offices and oak desks for an open cubicle in the bosom of their people.

Communications technologies have extended on the themes of physical proximity and collaborative effort by facilitating the flow of information. Returning to the Microsoft example, this company has had in place a corporate e-mail network since long before the rest of us made the “@” sign one of the most popular symbols in media. It is said that Big Bill himself (eventually) answers all messages, and that e-mailing has replaced other methods of communication to such an extent that the corridors of Microsoft are all but bereft of conversation. Microsoft thrives not merely on the talent of its employees, but because that talent is made available as a resource to everyone within the organization. If everyone has an e-mail address, everyone not only has a voice but also an ear. It permits a degree of accessibility and personal exchange within a monstrous company nearly as intimate as within a room full of friends.

Once an egalitarian system for communicating and sharing information is set-up, the organization is poised to achieve its objectives. Why? For starters, because less time and fewer resources will be spent on Macro Oversight, on the command-and-control apparatuses that burden overhead as much as they do the Human spirit. Employees feel happier, and work harder, in smaller, locally-focused teams that resemble an extended family. Intriguingly, most new jobs in 1995 were created by companies with fewer than a hundred employees, for the first time this century. Smallness, thus, seems to fostering productivity, creativity, and fueling the networked workplace.

Simpler structures hark back to a time when organizations were far less imposing than the impersonal monoliths imagined by Orwell. Human beings hunted and gathered in small groups of 10 to 15 individuals for some 200,000 years. Apparently, they fared well enough — triumphing over wild animals, the elements and the cruel indifference of nature. It makes a great deal of sense that today teams of about the same size are the most effective “tools” with which to pursue solutions to corporate problems. The key isn’t the size of the company. It’s how effectively its bands of ten or fifteen workers can rally to a task.

In government, meanwhile, middlemen may go the way of their counterparts in business. The Internet has helped Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Quebecois, and Northern Italians find and converse with kindred souls. Having begun such dialogues, citizens are pressing for independence, for the right to manage their own local affairs. And so, the coming of a Digital World will also mean a closer, more intimate world politically.

Where might it end? If the desire for smaller more localized spheres of human activity intensifies, one can imagine a world with not two hundred but ten thousand nations, each with about 600,000 people. Using technology, leaders of such states could be as attentive to their citizenry as are mayors of cities today. And people could migrate more easily from nation to nation, in pursuit of employment or communities more to their liking. It is a milder vision than Orwell’s (perhaps no less radical and frightening to some), but at least we are in the lucky position of being able to measure how far his original prediction missed.

articles | internet | microsoft | virtual organizations | george orwell

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 4:50 am and is filed under Essays, etc., Business, 1996. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.