A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

So is it possible to have Enterprise 2.0 or a Social Business without a democratic foundation? Is the employer/employee relationship the only way we can get work done? In describing Enterprise 2.0, Andy McAfee, who originated the term, says that our work structures will not change:

No, it’s not the death of the hierarchy, of the manager, of the org chart, of the job description, any of that stuff. Some of my colleagues who are interested in this phenomenon, I think take it a bit far, and they become zealots for the manager-free, hierarchy-free, gestalt organization. I don’t think that’s smart, and I don’t think it’s likely, and I don’t think it would be a good idea.

Everything we’re talking about is totally compatible with an official chain of command in a hierarchy. You still need someone to set direction and give marching orders. But the idea of input by many and decisions by few is a pretty powerful idea.

Perhaps hierarchy is a major part of the problem, though. Thomas Malone, in The Future of Work (2004) envisaged four potential organizational models for the network era:

Loose hierarchies
Literal democracy – voting for your boss
Outsourcing through specialized guilds
Markets within organizations

All of these are democratic to some extent. Malone wrote that we need to move away from Command & Control and toward a Coordinate & Cultivate management model. Is that possible without democracy?

Democracy is a work in progress, as we know from history, and the first step is commitment. David Korten in The Great Turning, described America, the Unfinished Project:

Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.

Commitment to democratic principles is often lacking in descriptions of Enterprise 2.0 and social business. Without such commitment, I think these initiatives will be seen in hindsight as just another management buzz-word. In 2008, some of the best known management experts were brought together to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their main premises were that:

1) management models are important social technologies;

2) the current models are out-of-date; and

3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

There was consensus that our current management systems do not work and several of their 25 recommendations were based on democratic principles:

• Redefine the work of leadership.
• Share the work of setting direction.
• Create a democracy of information.
• Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
• Retool management for an open world.
• Humanize the language and practice of business.

For management to work in the network era, it needs to embrace democracy, but we are so accustomed to existing structures that many executives would say it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. However, there are democratic business models that work today. Just not enough.

Enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or connected businesses. We need to integrate democratic organizing principles into our discussions on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Without a solid architectural organizing principle, I don’t think the Enterprise 2.0 ship will sail very far.

Self-governance not only works, it works better than command & control. In Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science, Charles Jacobs covered learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. A consistent theme is to let people manage themselves, because that works:

Rather than limit decentralization to the top of the hierarchy, why not drive it down into the organization as far as possible? Modern information technology makes such “radical decentralization” much easier now than it was in [Alfred] Sloan’s day.

Such an approach enables people to control their own destinies. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s aligned with the urgings of our selfish genes. From a market perspective, it’s more efficient and effective. From a cultural perspective, virtually every organizational innovation since the Western Electric Hawthorne studies has been aimed at fostering democracy and initiative in the workplace because it’s good for both people and the business. Moving to an entrepreneurial organization is just the next step.

Democracy can be a competitive advantage. At TEDx Belfast, Mark Dowds provided 8 reasons to democratize the workplace:

1. Reduced costs
2. Reduced workforce
3. Increased productivity
4. Getting closer to customers
5. Fewer layers of bureaucracy
6. Shorter time to market
7. Increased employee motivation
8. Increased recognition of employee contributions

Let me close with this note from Gwynne Dyer, who wrote that, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem“.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

We finally have the technology, so that even business no longer needs to be run as a tyranny.

—

Image: Bank of Canada

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed. ~ Paulo Freire” – via @surreallyno

“Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. ~ Ivan Illich” – via @IvanIllich2

@flowchainsensei – “Any organisation is screwed when it believes only certain privileged individuals can lead and/or manage.”

@melissapierce – “If you were a real rebel, you’d realize that anger is the trendiest emotion of all and you’d buck that trend with lusty immutable joy.”

@doctorjeff – “Next time a child comes at you with question after question – embrace it with a smile, for they chose … you.”

@umairh – “It’s no coincidence that “Davos” rhymes with “McFuture”.”

Yochai Benkler: Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megauplaod and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here – via @hreingold

Lesson 3: As the networked environment resists control, more of the flow of networked economy has to be sucked in to the enforcement vortex.

The Net is proving much harder to control than the industries anticipated when they got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA passed in 1998. In order to actually control materials on the Net, SOPA and PIPA tried to harness a range of technical, economic, and bureaucratic platforms, aimed to impede the functions of an ever-more-vaguely defined set of targets. Technical platforms included most prominently the DNS service and registrars and the search engines. Business platforms included payment systems and advertising systems. In order to achieve effective enforcement in a global digitally networked environment, Hollywood seems destined to try to draw an ever-larger set of platforms and actors into the risk of potential copyright and near-copyright liability.

When an enterprise moves to an organic, value-creating, diverse network, the training department has to join the fray. – by @jaycross

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

Homework: To Flip or to Toss? we read homework in class, discuss it in class, clarify and debate it in class — then briefly write about it at home – by @cburell

My current experiment involves not so much flipping homework as (almost) ending it. I’m using document-based lessons in which all reading and discussion is done in class, and the only homework is a reflective blog post about the day’s content on a team blog — which student team-members read and comment on with corrections, extensions, challenges, etc. I like this so far, for several reasons …

Sebastian Thrun: you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill (video) – via @downes

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “Learning is the main driver for productivity. Productivity of learning determines the speed of productivity improvement.”

Teaching: “The master taught by example to the apprentice, by coaching to the journeyman.” by @snowded

It matters who you teach. The more you know about the subject, the less able you are to [teach] beginners classes. I am sure there are some people who can manage this but i haven’t found one yet. In effect to teach (which again is different from speaking) you have to be separate but close in your knowledge base. Academic audiences are good for my work as they challenge and test in a way that a conference audience rarely does. Not only that, you can use words and reference concepts without explanation which means you move faster to more interesting grounds.

@flowchainsensei – “In a world of complexity and change, is consensus unrealistic, and does (ongoing) diversity of viewpoints offer more?”

No more business as usual: “As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice.” by @JayCross

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

“… old ideas, no matter how thoroughly discredited, die a slow death as, one by one, their advocates pass away. ~ Stiglitz” – via @DemingSOS

Do we need patents? by @lemire

Granting monopolies, even temporary ones, is expensive. We need to be sure that the gains out-weight the costs. In this case, the rationalization offered by the industry does not stand up to scrutiny:

• The U.S. and the U.K. have always had strong patent laws protecting chemicals and drugs. Meanwhile, continental Europe had much weaker patent protection. Until recently, you could not patent a drug or a chemical in Germany (1967), Switzerland (1977) and Italy (1978). Where did the pharmaceutical industry thrive before the 1960s? In Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Though Italy was the fifth produce of drugs in the 1970s, its industry is now practically disappearing.

2006

What good are notes if you don’t review them from time to time? I reviewed my notes from 2004 as well as notes from 2005 last January, so now it’s time to review my half-baked ideas from 2006.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus (We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae)

Curriculum is a solution to a problem we created, wrote Brian Alger, a quote that still sticks with me.

I started thinking about life in perpetual Beta - Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

On the “learning profession”: As a learning professional, it’s time to take a stance. Enabling learning is no longer about disseminating good content. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are no more experts, only fellow learners on paths that may cross.

Foreshadowing my business future in 2011, I wrote that perhaps individual expertise is gradually being replaced by collaborative expertise.

I was asked for one or two sentences on where the field of adult e-learning is going. My response was that the overwhelming majority of the learning needs of Canadian adults are not addressed by formal training and education. In this post-industrial era, adults today require self-directed learning skills to thrive in the unstructured work environments outside of school. Efforts should be focused on the development of practical tools and strategies for adults to learn in a networked information society.

I riffed on Jay Rosen’s theme and wrote about the people formerly known as students:

The people formerly known as students do not believe this problem ”too many individual learners” is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as students are those who were on the receiving end of an oligopolist educational system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few options, and accredited institutions competing to speak their truths while the rest of the population learned in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

My thoughts on a networked world were that in warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of defeated armies.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

Near the end of 2006, I concluded that  in our networked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.

Here are some of the thoughts and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@johnrobb – “If you aren’t inventing the future and taking your lumps for doing it today, you are going to be steamrolled by it later.”

@webestime – “Simple rules lead to complex behavior. Complicated rules lead to stupid behavior”

@transarchitect: “Emergence: It’s not magic … but it feels like magic.” via @SebPaquet

“History is a race between education and catastrophe. ~ H. G. Wells” via @iain2008

@TeenThings – “Things I learned in school: 1. How to whisper 2. How to text without looking 3. How to look like I’m thinking.”

@CharlesJennings – “in a complex world, continuous learning is the only option available to us” – Globalization, Complexity & Change

Many transactional jobs are being substituted with technology. Machines can replace a checkout clerk at a supermarket and can log deposits and dispense cash, but they can’t replace a marketing manager or an advertising campaign.

The implications of this trend for CLOs are clear. The challenges of jobs that deal with high levels of complexity and tacit interactions are best addressed through the development of core skills and capabilities, not through trying to teach sets of processes or facts.

@StevenBJohnson - How research works in an age of social networks (or at least how it works for me) [highly recommended post #PKM]

Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

@GSiemens: “Brilliant article on what happened w/ crash of Air France 447:  last paragraph is relevant in all human-tech systems” – Popular Mechanics

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Evolution of Social Business panel – by @BillIves

Andy said that social media did not change their culture. It exposed it and this is what they needed. They needed to move away from control.  Hearing the complaints is even more helpful that the complements because then you can address them.  Some companies are not ready for this. The CEO recognizes this.

@ourfounder - “If people want a set of processes that will not change in the future, that is a trap” – Evolving Web

 In most human endeavor today, certainly in knowledge work, but increasingly in manufacturing, we do not operate in the complicated domain, we operate in the complex domain. This is a domain where business process or team process can change from moment to moment. The speed at which new products can come to market, the decoupling of the production of an object from its design and sales, and the rate at which the markets and technologies change make any stolid process unsustainable and dangerous.

I don’t travel a lot. This year I was away for 47 days, or 13% of the year. The other 87% of the time I was in Sackville, in my home office or down at the café with wifi and lots of people I know. That’s probably why, in 2011, I have finally purchased my first smart phone, an iPhone 4s. My old phone was coming up for renewal and since I’ve been with the same vendor for over 20 years, I figured I’d probably stick with them, not that service is great, but it’s okay.

I decided to go with Apple’s latest offering for several reasons. The 8MP camera meant I would no longer need a separate camera (so my son is happy with his new hand-me-down Canon). The iPhone is good enough for me, a very amateur photographer. I was also intrigued with Siri and wanted to understand it and see what it might mean for workplace learning. Also, it looks like I’ll be travelling more in 2012, so buying equipment before year end just made business sense.

Basically, I’m a newbie with smart phones. This is a good thing, as I’ll have a better understanding of what challenges are presented to other workers as they have to adopt these technologies. I’ll try to narrate my learning as I figure out this mobile stuff, which my colleague Clark is so adept at.

I realize that mobile is a critical part of the future of workplace learning. I intend to do some serious learning this year. I also bought my son an iPhone 3GS and it’s amazing to see how quickly he has added it into his life. It’s time for me to keep up.

The future should be networked, writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Third Industrial Revolution. He sees the next industrial age, one bridging industrialism to continental collaboration as the most feasible post-carbon future. This era of networked energy will be based on 5 pillars, all essential for a successful transition:

1. shift to renewable energy
2. shift buildings to become local power plants
3. deploy energy stores locally, especially hydrogen
4. use the Internet to create a smart energy-sharing grid
5. shift transportation to plug-in & fuel cell power

Europe is leading the way and Rifkin spends a good part of the book setting up a narrative and understanding for an American audience. There’s lots here on how power is created, controlled and regulated. I was most interested in the way Rifkin connects so many perspectives together. The first part talks about energy but the book continues with sections on economics, politics and education. There is a good review of how many of our current institutions were forged at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, around 1890 – e.g. corporations, schools, utilities.

He discusses how bureaucracies are an outdated form of control. This resonated with me after my presentation on social media to federal assistant deputy ministers only a few weeks ago:

Still, systemic thinking is a difficult task in a bureaucratic environment where there is a strong drive to hold on to turf and protect domains. This is what leads to what I call the DG (director general) abyss – the process by which big-picture ideas, agreed to at the ministerial level and even higher at the head-of-state level, lose their heft and become increasingly smaller and more narrow in vision and scope as they descend down into the departments and agencies, finally ending up as a shadow of their former selves, languishing in the minutia of countless reports, studies and evaluations, whose purposes become increasingly obtuse, even to those tasked with managing them.

The institutions we created to mirror the dominant energy producer of the 20th century, big oil, are a large part of the problem:

The oil age from its onset has been characterized by gigantism and centralization. That’s because harnessing oil and other elite fossil fuels requires large amounts of capital and favors vertical economies of scale, which necessitates a top-down command and control structure. The oil business is one of the largest industries in the world. It’s also the most costly enterprise for collecting, processing and distributing energy ever conceived by humankind.

As the Internet economy has shifted to a distributed and collaborative model, so too must the energy economy. It will be a battle between centralized and distributed energy and how easy it will be for localities to participate and profit. Rifkin provides great detail on how this can be done by 2050 and his model has already been adopted by the European Union while the US and Canada lag behind. The younger generation already understand this model, as the President of Spain noted, “For a younger generation growing up on the Internet and comfortable interacting in social media, the hierarchically organized flow of authority and power from the top down is old school.”

Rifkin includes a good analysis of the education system and its issues, with a section entitled, The Biosphere becomes the Learning Environment. Though I found the first part a bit slow going I really enjoyed the second half and the synthesis it provides on much of my professional work. Near the end, Rifkin summarizes the fundamental communications shifts we’ve experienced, echoing Marshall McLuhan:

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness.

A recent NYT article on The Auteur vs. The Committee compares Apple and Google, describing Steve Jobs as an “auteur”:

Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”

As I wrote in 2004 - I’ve heard and discussed the film crew metaphor many times over the past five or so years. It makes sense that in order to address the constantly changing market needs that a more flexible work organization is necessary. The film production crew model seems viable, but the dark side, according to Gautam, is that the producer gets the lion’s share of the profits, and the superstars command the enormous fees, while the average worker just survives. I think that a more cooperative model, like the independent productions, where more of the workers share in the risk and the profit, is more sustainable. This is becoming evident as the barriers to production are coming down – such as lower-priced digital editing suites.

I agree that innovation needs diversity and the film-making model enables this by re-forming the team for each production while keeping the singular vision with one producer/director. I see the future of “net work” is in rapidly forming new teams who work under the vision of a Director. The model is kept dynamic by enabling these teams to quickly disperse and be re-created in new forms. An automatic exit strategy is baked into the business model, ensuring constant destruction of the old model and enabling evolution in successive group-forming.

The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organization has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. Add this to a constantly evolving organizational model and it might let us keep up with life in perpetual Beta. The key for a successful work organization will be balancing diversity with singular focus. Countries that have a social safety net may be more successful with this, as free-agents will have more control in selecting what “enlightened despot” they wish to work with next and not be pressured to just take any gig. Shifting to a new work model will require systemic changes in education, employment laws, social security and many other areas, but I have little doubt that the older model of indentured servitude has outlived its usefulness.

The Epic social learning debate for Summer 2011 states:

“This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks.”

Let’s examine why they grew in the first place. Training on a massive scale was a requirement for preparing citizen soldiers for war and initial methods were tested during the second world war (1939-45). A systems approach did not become standardized until after the war, led by applied research done by Robert Gagné, as noted by Donald Clark:

One of the interesting system development projects discussed in Gagne’s book is building a revised course of instruction for armor crewman training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The project was code named SHOCKACTION and undertaken during the late 1950s. The course trained tank crewmen to act as a tank commander, driver, gunner, or loader of the Army’s main battle tank. The course was considered important and worthy of considerable investment of research and development funds. It was noted by officers that the present course was not training armor crewmen to a level of proficiency.

The famous ADDIE model did not get adopted until 1975, just as the baby boomers were entering university and the business world. There was a need to train lots of people in North America and later elsewhere as economies grew. Training departments rose to the challenge.

For thousands of years people have developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The nation state and the industrial economy adopted a new competency development framework, from which we have modern training departments, professional associations, job competency models, etc. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. Even the information economy  is giving way to the creative economy.

In Social learning, complexity & the enterprise, I go over many of the factors that are forcing us to change how we think about learning and work, which is what training departments are supposed to focus on. The most significant change is in how we relate to, and deal with, information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people (like bloggers) who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Instructional content is no longer a scarcity. Neither are “instructors”. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous though the likes of Wikipedia and social networks.

The draining of the hierarchical pyramid will change not only training, but also intellectual property and the social contract with workers. In a shifting networked world, every artificial  structure will be affected, so why should the training department be impervious to these effects? Even money will change, as this article about  The Bitcoin Epoch being akin to the Printing Press Revolution shows.

We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents. Will the rise of social learning be the “cause” of the shrinking training department? Probably not. But it will be one of the effects.

What is the future of the corporate model in a knowledge society?

Networked workplaces are on the rise and are challenging the large corporation model. For instance, many big web companies have comparatively few staff. They leverage their networks.

But the corporation is not going to become suddenly extinct, as most of our laws and business practises favour the corporation over the individual. Witness who legally owns the intellectual property (IP) produced by the employee [answer: the corporation]. It’s only in some universities that the knowledge worker maintains these rights.

While salaried workers may not own their IP, they own more and more of the “know-how”. This intangible know-how is the real value of knowledge – being able to do something with it. We are seeing the rise of  knowledge artisans who bring their tools; and leave with them. This is change from the bottom of the organizational pyramid.

Intellectual Property itself has minimal value and much IP isn’t worth the effort to protect it. Consider that companies like Facebook and Twitter have not built their businesses on patent applications. They’re too busy refining their business models, which are in perpetual Beta. Much business value is not in the idea or even the artifact that represents it, but in the speed and vigour of implementation.

The command and control corporate model may be forced to change when shareholders really understand that the valuation of their average corporation is getting to be more than 85% intangible assets. These intangibles are worthless without the know-how of knowledge workers. Therefore the actual value of the average corporation, without its people, is getting close to zero. So where would you put your money? In the corporation or in the people? For now, you have limited options, but who knows if this may change.

Look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

• Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
• Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
• Workers manage their own schedules
• Each worker has a unique “competency model” [farewell HR]
• Customers participate in projects

This sounds like a wirearchy or what I would describe as a structure that fosters multi-way flows of power based on trusted relationships facilitated by networked transparency. It reflects what chaordic structures have tried to do – balance chaos and order. Between chaos and order lies complexity, and that’s what simpler, but more nimble, organizational structures can better address.

In a networked world, the future of the corporation will be different, just as the future of many countries today looks suddenly different.

Thanks to Timbuk3 for the title inspiration.