Chapter 9 - Implications for Organization Design
The author tells a rather bizarre story about a firm that, after a merger, decided to stop giving employees a holiday turkey - which seemed a small manner to the board but caused an uproar among the staff. Her point is ultimately that when decisions are made by a few people behind closed doors, things can go horribly wrong - and what seems trivial may actually be quite important.
Why Is P2P Architecture Important?
The "mass" approach to managing employees and serving customers is most effective when those employees and customers are a homogeneous group - but given the multiculturalism of western society and the global scale of business, it is becoming less realistic to expect that all people will react in the same way to any decision, and there are fewer one-size-fits-all solutions.
This is all the more reason to decentralized decision-making and delegate authority as far down the chain as possible, so those who are closest to the place where the impact will occur can lend their knowledge of the potential impact that may be buried in the aggregated mass of data about the entire organization, which is what is seen at headquarters.
While technology has been heralded as a method to communicate information from the field to the hub and back with increased frequency and accuracy, information technology is cold. The computer doesn't know what the numbers mean, and can only represent abstract metrics that need to be interpreted and acted upon.
The author draws an analogy that compares a traditional organization to an orchestra and a networked organization to an improvisational jazz group. In the latter case, there is no conductor with a master score who merely organizes the activities of others who play in unison - but a core group who start the melody on which others will adapt and improvise. (EN: She crawls a little too far inside the metaphor and, I think, totally loses the plot a few paragraphs later.)
The point is that in a networked group, the customers don't all have the same experience - but the experience is adapted by those closest to the service environment to ensure it's suitable to a heterogeneous market of highly idiosyncratic customers.
The Work Experience
The author's experience as an academic suggests the decreasing importance of having a fixed location in which to work. The university at which she teaches has multiple campuses, and she and her assistant are able to communicate via their computer network - such that even if her assistant is in a different location she is able to receive work orders and report the completion of tasks, and the two of them do not need to be in a common workspace. As a matter of fact, her assistant could be working from any location on the planet.
She backpedals a bit, in that there are needs for people to be in the same place at the same time (to teach a class, for example) and even in situations like a company with a staff of travelling salespeople, there is always a "home base" where they gather periodically. And there is a valid need to monitor some individuals, such as new hires, to observe where they encounter difficulties that they might not be inclined to report. So we're not ready to completely abandon shared spaces - as they have their purposes - but perhaps a change in perspective is necessary to move from a culture in which people are physically together by default and separated when necessary to one in which independence is the default and physical proximity must be justified.
There is a similar situation with the need for people to interact in real time. In a more physical world where workers on an assembly line must touch the same product or an office in which they must access the same paper files, there was a valid need to be in the same place at the same time. But in the digital world, workers can be independent in time: it does not matter if an individual does a task from 9 to 5 or works from midnight to 8 or 4 to midnight so long as it is done by the following day when the next person will receive their work product.
(EN: The current pressure of "time to market" is interfering with this ability - when the next task must start as soon as possible after the prerequisite is completed, there is increased time pressure and a need to hand off work, which limits the ability to be flexible with time. Culturally, we will need to dial back to a more reasonable pace in order to be flexible with time.)
There's a brief shift to the notion of communities, which has become highly flexible. In the distant past the people in a community did everything together - they lived close to one another, shopped in the same places, worked in the same fields, and participated in the same social activities with the same groups of people. In the present world, it would be very unusual for a person in a developed accompany to work in the same office as the people in their apartment building.
(EN: in a cultural sense, this has actually been going on for a while. A person feels some cohesion with neighbors, but also has several groups of acquaintances based on their activities - and each activity comes with its own group of people: work, school, church, volunteer activities, recreation, etc. It likely goes back to the age of the automobile, when it became feasible to travel among various places and interact with various groups.)
Of course, the mobility of people comes with its drawbacks: people do not meet by chance, or discover things accidentally. Much of the innovation that occurs in an office environment happens around the water cooler and coffeepot where people chance to meet others or overhear conversations that intrigue them. These happy accidents cannot occur in a networked and digital community because you can't overhear an email conversation or chance to meet someone who's sitting at own computer interacting with the same server.
The Work Environment
In the physical world, there are public places and private places, and this continues to be true in a networked organization. A discussion group on the company intranet is seen by everyone; a private group may be created where the information is seen by a chosen few; and a private message is seen only by its intended recipient.
The author speaks a bit about physical offices: the bullpen environment with desks in an open room, the cubicle farms in which there is limited visibility, closed offices in which a person is completely unseen by others, or meeting rooms where people gather for a purpose. There are also common areas such as cafeterias, break rooms, and hallways where people gather accidentally.
While the use of portable computers and mobile devices enables people to separate from one another, the design of office spaces seems to be struggling to bring them back together. Consider the open floor plans at companies such as Google, which encourage (and sometimes require) people to be physically visible to one another.
Even more ironically, companies are further attempting to maintain a common physical environment by offering subsidized or free food (to keep people from leaving the office to have lunch), workout rooms and leisure areas (so you don't have to go home to relax), and even rooms in which an employee can lie down to take a nap.
So on one hand there is the notion that a networked organization does not need to have a common physical space, while on the other hand firms are attempting to keep employees confined to a common physical space.