Systematizing Your Company and Tapping Into the Revolution

Do you have a job or own a business? If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job. This is the first barrier to tapping into the new resources being made available to organizations across the globe. Without a systematic method of serving clients and conducting business, you cannot leverage your company using the tools of the business revolution.

While attending a recent conference in San Francisco, I noticed that a lot of company “owners” were involved in mobile telephone calls and urgently replying to emails in the middle of important presentations and during conversation that they had traveled to benefit from. It seemed like many of their businesses, were still, in various ways, largely depending on their personality and abilities in operating the day-today. The fear expressed by some when I would hear their complaints is that when not around, customers may contemplate obtaining products or services elsewhere. So what is wrong with this picture?

When your business depends on you, your customers are counting on your ability to fulfill their needs; not your businesses' ability. So of course, when you are absent, there is nobody left to take care of them as well as you could, and that is why they go somewhere else. The solution is a SYSTEM dependant company, not a PEOPLE dependant company. This concept is largely the reason many businesses are unable to tap into new solutions that the revolution in business is providing today. By failing to focus on systemization and not understanding the true customer processes at work in the manner of conducting business, owners and managers are cut off from alternatives that would provide tremendous opportunities for their future. Thus enabling them to be more productive and focus on essential parts of developing their companies.

Many leading businesses meet their customers' needs regardless of the personnel on duty. Have you visited a Starbucks during a busy morning rush? Does it matter if the founder of Starbucks is not there to serve you? Starbucks has developed a system that works; customers generally receive consistently good service, regardless of who is working. This system doesn't rely on highly skilled extraordinary people that are in short supply in the market place. Instead, it leverages productivity and good work out of people that are in more ample supply. It is a "turn-key solution." There are many other examples of enterprises such as this. You must build a system that works; which is your business. Then you need to give the key to others, enabling them to use the system, and to improve it based upon their own experiences.

Creating a real and viable company is about building a business that works not because of you but without you. It is only after you have built your systems that work without you, that you are freed from the Company. Ask this question; “How can I give my customer the services and products that they want SYSTEMATICALLY rather than PERSONALLY?” People are important. But, relying on people without process is like having a driver without a vehicle. If you want to go somewhere, you need both. Thinking in terms of systematization is the first step in tapping into the tools the revolution openly provides to everyone wishing to participate.

The "Employee" an Inefficient Model for the Future

At its core, the employee and employer relationship does not serve the new business environment. The "single job" model is a relationship where a person assigns control to an organization in exchange for a mitigation of risk. As a result of the revolution, successful organizations will rid themselves of these types of relationships because at their very core they are inefficient and no longer applicable.

The best and most innovative work comes only from true commitments freely made between people in a spirit of partnership, not from bosses telling people what to do. Leadership cannot be assigned or bestowed by power or structure; you are a leader if and only if people follow your leadership when they have the freedom not to. Conversely, those without leadership skill will quickly be rendered impotent as associates simply bypass them and align around those who can lead. In effect these mechanisms allow groups of associates to fire their boss.

If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of vesting people with the power to fire their boss, then you’re not ready for the task of running a business or managing a business in the new world that is emerging as a result of the revolution in business today. As people become more comfortable with ambiguity, they will trade the single-job model for a multiclient model, thus granting to any single organization or person less power over their lives and livelihood. Droves of mid level managers who lost jobs in the past decade, for example, suddenly learned that low ambiguity in the form of a single job comes at a price of high risk because all of their eggs were in one basket. This shift is apparent as older executives bemoan the “lack of loyalty” in the younger generation. Yet there is no less loyalty in the younger generation. Younger people are just granting less power to any single organization; they are less subservient because they have more degrees of freedom. And the complaining executives are confusing subservience to power with loyalty to cause. But they are very different concepts. Business owners and managers will need to develop the latter and eliminate dependence on the former to be effective in the new world. Eventually the single-job employment structure will be seen as a barbaricform of organization, much as indentured servitude is seen today. We will see a greater shift away from the ownership of people through employment, which is nothing other than an advanced form of owning people by owning their time. In the future every relationship, at least in the best organizations, will be viewed conceptually as a joint venture.

Exerpts from an article, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down.The article first appeared in Leading Beyond the Walls, a book edited and produced by the Peter F. Drucker Foundation on Non-Profit Management and published by Jossey-Bass books, 1999.

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

In dealing with and managing the impacts of the revolution one must attempt to understand the drivers behind the change. So much of gaining understanding relating to this complex topic lies in letting go of past concepts previously relied upon and at the core of many of our belief systems. Dr. Felix Stalder (See  http://research.openflows.com), an expert in a variety of issues surrounding technology and its connection to society, published these reflections on Dr. Castell's book Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/CastellsM.aspx . It is enlightening literature for people to begin to understand the truly mammoth ground swell of change occurring at present and evolving more rapidly than many can grasp. Academic in nature, the observations shared by Stalder and Castell are enlightening indeed.

The Network Paradigm: Social Formations in the Age of Information by Dr. Felix Stalder

 

The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I. M. Castells (1996). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 556 pp., ISBN 1-55786-617-1

The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 461 pp., ISBN 1-55786-874-3

The End of the Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 418 pp., ISBN 1-55786-872-7

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996, 1997 and 1998) is unrivaled in ambition: to make sense of the global social dynamics as they arise out of a myriad of changes around the world. It is a cross-cultural analysis of the major social, economic and political transformations at the end of this century. It is presented through interrelated empirical case studies whose number and variety are truly enormous–the bibliography alone fills 120 pages–and threatens to overwhelm the reader at times. Nevertheless, the trilogy is prodigious and sets a new standard against which all future meta-accounts of the Information Society will be measured. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in a grand narrative of the present.

Castells’ main argument is that a new form of capitalism has emerged at the end of this century: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. It is challenged around the globe by a multitude of social movements on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their own lives and environment. This tension provides the central dynamic of the Information Age, as "our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self" (1996, p. 3). The Net stands for the new organizational formations based on the pervasive use of networked communication media. Network patterns are characteristic for the most advanced economic sectors, highly competitive corporations as well as for communities and social movements. The Self symbolizes the activities through which people try to reaffirm their identities under the conditions of structural change and instability that go along with the organization of core social and economic activities into dynamic networks. New social formations emerge around primary identities, which may be sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial or national in focus. These identities are often seen as biologically or socially unchangeable, contrasting with the fast-paced change of social landscapes. In the interplay of the Net and the Self the conditions of human life and experience around the world are deeply reconfigured.

The trilogy concludes more than a decade of research, spanning from new social movements and urban change (Castells, 1983; 1989) to development of the high-tech industries and their organization into technopoles, clusters of high-tech firms and institutions of higher education, such as the Silicon Valley (Castells and Hall, 1994), to comparative analysis of the fastest developing countries in the Asian Pacific Rim (Castells, 1992), to research conducted in Russia before and after the 1991 revolution and the demise of the Soviet Union.

It details the diversity of social change interlinked around the globe which created the Information Age and integrates the often seemingly contradictory trends into a comprehensive analytical framework. The theoretical abstractions are developed through a broad and detailed empirical analysis "as a method of disciplining my theoretical discourse, of making it difficult, if not impossible, to say something that observed collective action rejects in practice" (1997, p. 3). This makes his account highly accessible and richly textured.