Industrial-era corporations are at war with themselves
and we are caught in the crossfire.
The endless restructuring of the past three decades provides the
backdrop for the rise of alternative, collaborative and less
hierarchical ways to organise ourselves through the web: forms of
organisation that rely on what I call
"We
Think".
The large corporation that emerged in the late 19th and early
20th centuries was built on a military model of organisation:
everyone had their place in a rank, every place defined a function,
authority flowed through a chain of command from top to bottom. If
you were unsure what to do next, you looked at your job description
and if that did not provide an answer you asked the next person up
the chain of command for instructions.
As corporations struggled to accelerate innovation, improve
quality, cut costs and attract consumers with a wider array of
products, it was often unclear whether the hierarchical corporation
was disintegrating into networks of
outsourced
production or whether, on the contrary, it was tightening its
grip through stricter performance management and centralised
control of brands.
The outcome is that in most corporations' hierarchies are
flatter, job descriptions vaguer, the working day more flexible,
the working week more extendable, careers more unpredictable and
the boundaries of organisations more porous as companies have to
come to rely on shifting networks of polygamous partners and
suppliers.
Getting more productivity, innovation and quality seems to
require ever-greater pain to make organisations leaner and meaner.
The outcome is more managerial turnover, employee stress and
organisational turmoil.
We Think is emerging as an alternative organisational recipe. It
provides a more effective answer to the multiple challenges
organisations face. Open and collaborative models of organisation
will increasingly trump closed and hierarchical models as a way to
promote innovation, organise work and engage consumers.
In field after field, large groups of committed and
knowledgeable contributors, collaborating with little hierarchy,
are mobilising resources on a scale to match the biggest
corporations in the world to create complex products and services.
This should not be possible. Pigs do not fly. In the next few years
the irresistible force of collaborative mass innovation will meet
the immovable object of the entrenched corporate organisation.
We Think will not transform every business. Communes, mutuals
and worker co-operatives often failed in the past. We Think has
produced some impressive collective voluntary initiatives such as
open source software, sites such as Slashdot and Oh My News in
South Korea and, most famously, Wikipedia. But most people cannot
pay for the groceries in the gift economy.
That is why We Think entrepreneurs are desperately searching for
business models that will allow them to earn some money without
turning their backs on the values of their community. Meanwhile,
traditional companies are trying to become more open and
collaborative: witness Microsoft's recent announcement that it
would open up some of its source code to outside developers.
The most exciting business models of the future will be hybrids
that blend elements of the company and the community, commerce and
collaboration: open in some respects, closed in others, giving some
content away and charging for some services, serving people as
consumers and encouraging them to become participants when
possible.
One of the biggest changes will be how businesses organise
innovation.
Modern capitalism is defined by its ability to conjure up a
stream of new products, services, organisational models and
experiences almost out of thin air. For most of the past century we
believed new ideas would come from special people, working in
special places, often wearing special clothes: the boffin in his
white coat in the lab, the zany inventor in his garage, the
loft-living bohemian wandering the cultural quarter.
Innovation was seen as a linear and sequential process from
invention through development to application. The consumers waiting
at the end of the pipeline played little role other than deciding
whether or not to use the product.
This pipeline model is increasingly breaking down.
The spread of the web means that more people than ever can begin
and take part in creative conversations to combine their ideas and
insights. In open source communities, innovation succeeds through
early exposure to comments and criticism, which allows ideas to be
refined, adjusted and re-interpreted. Open source communities
provide a setting for critical, creative, often raucous and
sometimes brutally honest discussion.
Creativity will still emerge from specially gifted individuals
working in special places. But thanks to rising levels of
education, ubiquituos mass communications and cheaper technology,
innovation and creativity are becoming increasingly distributed,
and emerging from many, often unexpected, sources.
Henry Ford created a model for mass production Linus Torvalds
and his ilk are creating a way to organise mass innovation.
We Think: mass innovation, not mass production, is published by
Profile and is available from Amazon. Charlie Leadbeater will be
talking about the book at the British Library on the evening of 26
March.
Charles Leadbeater has won the David Watt prize for
journalism, is a Fellow of the National Endowment of Science,
Technology and the Arts, and spent 10 years working for the
Financial Times where he was labour editor, industrial editor and
tokyo bureau chief.