A global revolution is underway, a social upheaval in organization that involves you and everyone you know.
Networks, the signature form of organization for the 21st century, are everywhere--but instead of wiping out hierarchy and bureaucracy, networks reduce them and transform them. In the Age of the Network, there's room for all types of organizations. The art of co-opetition, combining cooperation and competition, is key to success. When people learn to cross their own organizational boundaries, they gain great power. Working in teamnets--networks of teams--people can do together what they cannot do alone.
"The network is emerging, the signature form of organization in the Information Age, just as bureaucracy stamped the Industrial Age, hierarchy controlled the Agricultural Era, and the small group roamed in the Nomadic Era."
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An online hypertext book all about organizational networks by
Jessica Lipnack
and Jeffrey Stamps.
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"Does this mean "smash the boundaries," "tear down the hierarchy," and "dismantle the bureaucracy?" |
Why Networks? The 30,000-foot View
A global revolution is underway, a social upheaval in organization that involves you and everyone you know. It shakes every place of work, quakes the foundations of our biggest institutions and our smallest groups, even sends quivers into our homes and communities. It swirls through organizations of all sizes, in all sectors, in all countries. Regardless of gender, race, creed, or economic status, people are turning their organizations upside down, on their sides, and inside out.
Does this mean "smash the boundaries," "tear down the hierarchy," and "dismantle the bureaucracy?" Clear out the old to make way for the new" goes the conventional wisdom. Appealing as these slogans of management revolution might be, they are misleading. Has any organization you know rid itself entirely of hierarchy and bureaucracy? What is more important, should it?
To develop healthy, flexible, intelligent organizations for the 21st century, we need to harvest the best of the past and combine it with what is really new. Surely, some learning from thousands of years of organizational life must be worth keeping. There must be continuity as well as change. So, what is timeless in hierarchy and precious in bureaucracy? Where's the baby and what's the bath water? What should we throw out, what is best to keep, what is both new and will be enduring?
Click to Read more about the Age of the Network in Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps' online version of this free to read book.
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