The Future of the Organisation: A Compelling Vision

Based on ‚The IndividualizedCorporation‛ (Random House, 1997), by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A.Bartlett

Developed as a presentation,‚Organising Your Future‛ for TomorrowToday.biz, see http://www.tomorrowtoday.biz/orgfuture.

1. Introduction

In their book, The IndividualizedCorporation[1],Sumantra Ghoshal[2]and ChristopherA. Bartlett[3]present an alternative view of what the future of the organisation mightbe. Their intent is not to provide adetailed ‚how to‛ manual for organisational change, but rather to presentreasons why change is needed and some frameworks within which change will needto be envisaged and attempted.

The authors specificallylay out their intent: ‚rather than focus on the artefacts of the problems, wewant to help managers understand their root causes. And instead of adding tothe proliferation of prescriptive tools and normative techniques, we havedeveloped a set of integrated ideas and a conceptual framework that we believeprovides [a] mental map of the new corporate terrain.‛[4]Hidden towards the end of the book,almost as an afterthought, seems to be the purpose behind the author’s variousobservations and suggestions. For them,successful corporations are increasingly shaping their organisational structuresto fit the talents and motivations of their employees, thus harnessing theircreative and entrepreneurial talents and ‚evolving‛ as an entity[5]. The corporation’s role is to define broadpurposes and ambitions in which such individuals can find a place to belong. As such, corporations will assume a muchgreater role as social institutions and ‚primary creators and distributors ofvalue‛ as well as being ‚creators of substantial amounts of social capitalthrough their role as forums for human interaction and personal fulfilment, andthrough the vital contributions to the development of people.‛[6]

‚Underneath the structuresand processes of the Individualised Corporation lies a very differentmanagement philosophy. Grounded in adifferent set of assumptions about human nature and the roles of institutionsin modern society, this philosophy leads to some very different beliefs aboutthe role of the company in society, about the relationship between employersand employees, and about the functions of management in its obligations as aprofession. Overall, it posits a verydifferent moral contract between the individual, the company, and society. It is this new moral contract, more than anyof its specific operating characteristics, that is the essence of theIndividualised Corporation.‛[7]

1.1. Some concerns

I have two minor quibbles with the book. The book, while gripping in its content, is not entirely accessible ineither its style or structure[8].I was more than halfway through the bookwhen I finally worked out the structure for each of the sections. I am sure that if Sumantra Ghoshal had nottragically passed away[9],the publishers would have insisted on a revision and reprinting of thebook. In fact, seminars done by theauthors seem to be a lot more helpful in following the flow of their thoughts[10].

Secondly, I have some concern around the particular use of the casestudy method in this book. Whenever theauthors attempt to draw lessons from the vast amount of direct case studyresearch conducted, there are always three conclusions drawn. This occurs so regularly throughout the bookthat it feels contrived. In most cases,the actual content is excellent. Itwould have just been much better for the authors to present a framework,without overly referencing particular case study examples. In a similar book with a similar theme andintent, Reggie McNeal puts it this way:

That is why this book is nota travel brochure (‚go here to see this‛). When I give illustrations of leaders and [organisations] who areoperating effectively within the these new [realities], I deliberately don’tgive specifics. I want to give youenough suggestion for you to prepare for your own journey.[11]

Of course, Ghoshal and Bartlett are always quick to remind the readernot to rely on the case studies. Theysay that the descriptions of organisational development of a few key examplecompanies are used ‚merely as an example, not a model for all companies‌.different organizational forms work for different companies. Each entity must define its own version basedon its strategic imperatives and organizational history. There are, however, some core processes thatare likely to be common to all.‛[12] It is these commonalities of the emergingorganisational model that they claim to focus in on.

2. Where We’ve Come From

The opening chapters of the book deal with the context of emergingconnection economy.[13] Like most organisational analysts, they likegoing back into history to show a natural progression from where we’ve come towhere we’re going. They use the story ofHalley’s Comet as an anchor for a three part progression in the story of thehistory of the corporation. In 1835 asthe comet hurtled past the earth the concept of a limited liability entity wasemerging in Europe and the United States - the vehicle of financing in theIndustrial Era was being born. The ‚corporation‛ was the key to financing the ageof machines. This new kind of organization was necessary because a new era wasunder way, an industrial revolution that would utterly alter the whole scope ofbusiness. These first corporations would be the first vertically integratedorganizations, involved in the planning, designing, making, and selling ofproducts across national borders.

As the comet returned in 1911, the era of mass production was forcing achange on this corporate entity. Frederick Winslow Taylor published his ‚Principles of ScientificManagement‛ (1911) and Pierre du Pont was starting his experiments indiversification - a few years later to be pioneered as the divisionalisedCorporation by Alfred Sloan at General Motors. By creating divisions, the headsof corporations were able to allocate capital to a diversified, competingportfolio of businesses at the same time. Divisionalisation was the wonder of its day,allowing corporations to grow larger than ever while still being led by arelatively small group.

‚[A] 1950s-based culture was ideal in the post-war era in which acompany’s opportunities exceeded its ability to fund them, in an environment inwhich innovation, responsiveness, flexibility, and learning had become vitalsources of competitive advantage, [and] a management context [was] framed bycompliance, control, contract, and constraint.‛[14]

As the comet swung by again in 1986, the Japanese led the new revolutionof excellence and global efficiency and effectiveness. Jack Welch of GE made his name as the ‚managerof the century‛ by completely focusing his attention on growth, efficiency andeffectiveness. But that has not beenenough to rescue business from the harm inflicted on it by large, centralisedbureaucracies.

‚By the mid-1990s, the managers of most large companies felt that thetoolkits were overflowing and their apprenticeships had been served. Yet most remained confused about what it wasthey were creating. Worse still, theoutcomes were disappointing: Many of the change initiatives had provenunsuccessful, and even where they had seemed to pay off, they had not bridgethe widening gap between the companies’ strategic imperatives and theirorganisational and managerial capabilities.‛[15]

Other authors, of course, have gone much further back in time to provetheir point. Thomas Malone[16],for example, goes right the way back to the hunter gatherers to show society’sprogression from independent to centralised to decentralised systems. Malone’s model, as with many others, servesto reinforce the story told by Ghoshal and Bartlett. In particular, he argues that a given therecent rapid advances in communication technologies, and especially thedramatic decrease in the cost of communication, ‚you can afford to decentralisein a way that gives you both the benefits of bigness, like scale economies, andthe benefits of smallest, like motivation and flexibility.‛[17]

3. The Old Management Context

Inthe name of efficiency and accountability, divisionalised hierarchicalcompanies place a premium on divided accountability at the expense of broadercross-unit collaboration that drives organisational learning. But this was essential at a time when therewere many opportunities � in fact, when the primary management role was toensure that the company did not pull itself apart as it diversified, and whenone of the major functions of top executives was to choose between too manyopportunities, not all of which could be pursued.

Manydifferent management models emerged to try and help stretched Executives managethe realities of their business. Mostemphasized Strategy, Systems and Structure[18]. Traditional companies, designed and managed forthis era, were characterised by four main management strategies emerging out ofmanagerial context described above:

• Constraint â€? This is the negative side of Strategy. ‚As companies expanded and diversified, top management found it increasingly important to develop clear, focused definitions of corporate strategy as boundaries within which those with delegated responsibility could operate.‛[19] This was particularly true in an environment in which opportunities for expansion in exceeded most companies’ ability to finance them. Constraint (and strategy) was helpful in preventing diversification from becoming unmanageable or from wantonly dissipating precious resources. ‚Eventually, however, as broad strategic objectives were specified in detailed strategic plans and translated into specific portfolio roles for different businesses, the strategic constraints became confinements and the operating boundaries became barriers‌. The strategic process became constraint that not only affected how managers could act but ultimately how they could think. Constantly bombarded by strategic visions, roles, goals, challenges, and priorities, front-line managers retreated into a passive mode far removed from the spirit that had once powered the organization’s growth engine.‛[20]
• Compliance â€? this is the negative side of structure. It was important, even vital, in the post war years when many companies diversify their activities into scores of inviting opportunities. As they began their rapid expansion into a diverse range of new businesses and markets, most found an urgent need to have widely dispersed employees complying with common policies and uniform practices so as to prevent powerful centrifugal forces from pulling their organisations apart. Many employed the classic military model of line authority, ensuring that employees would follow the direction set by the leaders. Of course, this could also degenerate into a pathological form, where inflexible procedures and authoritarian intolerance of dissent prevented policies from being challenged and shut down a meaningful debate on top-down directives.[21] Front line managers learnt to keep their mouths shut and comply, or at least tell their bosses what they wanted to hear.
• Contract â€? This is the negative side of Systems. It is ‚a characteristic born of legalistic biases that became greatly strengthened by two more recent organisational trends: the highly incentive-leveraged compensation systems that reinforced the notion of a financially based relationship between the company and its employees, and the massive restructuring, rationalisation, and redundancy programs that underlined the fact that this relationship could be terminated at any time‌ it eventually lead to a formalisation and depersonalisation of the way in which individuals felt about their companies‌ More and more, they felt like employees of an economic entity, and less and less like members of a social institution.‛[22]
• Control â€? This is the negative face of all three of the above. Control is the leadership curse of our age, being so deeply rooted as a norm of classic hierarchical relationships. In a divisionalised structure, corporate level executives delegate substantial responsibility to a new level of general managers only if they have the mechanisms to hold them accountable. The primary method of control is financial, around budgeting and reporting, with sophisticated capital planning and operational budgeting systems to establish top down control throughout the organisations. ‚While such systems proved highly effective in allocating funds and driving ongoing performance, they eventually contributed to a deterioration in interpersonal relationships. The object of setting and forecasting processes often degenerated into a gameplaying exercise between adversaries, and the monitoring activity frequently became an excuse for an increasingly powerful corporate staff to intervene in the operations of front-line managers. Once again, the impact of the front-line managers’ behaviour was to make them defensive and risk averse.‛[23]

It is important to understand what the old context is, so that we canbetter understand what it needs to be. We must also understand that the four items mentioned above were not bad� they were necessary at the time in which they rose to prominence. The intent behind each of them was important,and some of their elements would still be valuable today. But we must go beyond them.

4. The Changing Management Context

As the 1990s dawned, downsizing,rightsizing, outsourcing, de-layering, re-engineering, and empowerment allindicated that companies were undergoing a fundamental change in theircorporate models, organisational structures and the role of management. Many leaders are still scrambling to keep up,and desperately trying to find solutions in an age of transition. Globalisation is a driving force behind thischange, but so too are information technologies, deregulation, privatisation,the service-based economy, the convergence of industry boundaries, offshoring(global outsourcing of services), increasing efficiency in global capital andmoney markets and the knowledge revolution. Today’s scarce resources are the information, knowledge, and expertisethat are embedded in people’s heads, and networks of human relationships. Companies designed to efficiently allocate andcontrol financial capital have got to change so that they can develop anddiffuse intellectual capital and manage human capital.[24]

In this new emergingbusiness reality, strategy is no longera purely executive function because front-line people know more about businesspressures and customer needs than CEOs. Much of that knowledge is lost, distorted and delayed as it isstandardised and stripped down for formalised reports to managers up the chainof command. Structure building as a task of senior executives is oftenirrelevant because the structures they design are irrelevant and temporary atbest. Systems design is equallyproblematic for senior executives. Engagingpeople’s imaginations and designing work so that it matters to people is notsomething that can be done from a top floor corner office. If attracting and retaining people is acritical competency of the 21^st century, then the ability to designsystems that inspire people, rather than soulless systems designed purely toachieve functional outcomes is critical for success � and is best done bypeople close to the operational levels of the organisation.

Ghoshal and Bartlett suggest moving beyondtraditional management models. ‚Ourobservation is that in the emerging knowledge-based, service-intensiveenvironment in which companies compete today, management must supplementtraditional hard edged tools with a perspective offered by the broader and moredynamic model that we have defined as the purpose, process, people philosophy.‛[25]

Purpose is aboutproviding a guiding vision for the organisation. It goes beyond strategy in that it is about why a company exists, not just what it exists for. ‚Today, the corporate leader’s greatestchallenge is to create a sense of meaning within the company, which its memberscan identify, in which they share a feeling of pride, and to which they arewilling to commit themselves.‛[26] Processmoves beyond structure in that it looks at integrating different operatingunits and ensuring the free flow of information, transfer of ideas and bestpractices within the organisation. Managingpeople in a service-based economyrequires much more than defining priorities and monitoring operations throughdetail-oriented information, planning, and control systems. ‚What it means is that instead of thehistorical reliance on planning systems for setting direction, they rely on thedeployment of key people to specific jobs to influence the company’s evolution.Similarly, instead of dependingprimarily upon formal information systems to influence the nature ofinformation processing in the company, top management communicates complexideas, senses subtle signals, and fosters the transfer of knowledge through itspersonal relationship with people. And,instead of depending exclusively or even primarily on the traditional controlsystems, managers find more effective ways of influencing people’s behavioursby shaping the context in which people work.‛[27]

5. New Management Tasks

In this environment, each of the four traditional managementcharacteristics must be superseded. Theold abilities are sometimes still needed, but new skills must now extend andenhance a modern manager’s abilities. The changes are as follows:

� compliance to discipline (independence/responsibility)

� constraint to stretch (mastery)

� contract to trust (belonging)

� control to support (generosity).[28]

The definitions of each of these are:

Discipline — ‚is the performance standard that comes from within each individual.‛[29] ‚It is more than compliance to directives or conformity to policies; it is an embedded norm that makes people live by their promises and commitments.‛[30]Discipline includes the rules of engagement that constitute the required level of behaviour that is an absolute condition of employment. It is instilled by:

• establishing clear standards and expectations, as well as emotional commitment to bridging visible performance gaps. ‚More grounded and measurable than the vague objectives of a vision statement yet more broadly framed and durable than the line items of the annual budget, these standards and expectations are the criteria that set the height of the bar and define the conditions for autonomy.‛[31]
• consistency in the application of sanctions for underperforming units and individuals who are dealt with quickly and firmly in a no excuses culture.
• democratisation of information.
• implementing a system of open and fast-cycle feedback, with openness, honesty and candour in the review process at every level of the organisation.
• creating a cult-like culture through careful socialisation of new recruits, with an intensive education and development focus.

Stretch � is the ability to engage people with a challenge and move them to a level of performance they did not know they were capable of by ‚liberating and energizing [them, and] raising individual aspiration levels and encouraging people to lift their expectations of themselves and others.‛[32] To create stretch:

• establish shared ambition through well communicated and shared goals.
• visible celebrations of successes will breed optimism.
• structure around focused, small groups that are specialised and niched, resulting in ‚the emergence of a collective identity‛[33].
• ensuring that individuals have a clear picture of how their own tasks contribute to the overall performance of the company, and have an ability to create personal meaning and ownership.

Trust — is the glue that bonds organisations together and allows people the freedom to experiment. ‚People who trust one another rely on each other’s judgments and depend on reciprocal commitment.‛[34] It can be developed by:

• ‚[high levels of] perceived fairness and equity in the company’s decision processes‛.[35]
• continually increasing the overall level of personal competence at all levels of the organisation. Jack Welch used to refer to this as ‚increasing the average IQ of the company‛.
• ensuring that decisions are made in collective meetings, based on objective data and no subsequent changes are made in one-on-one deals.
• teamwork occurs within and across units. ‚Even when decisions run counter to the interests of individuals, they are exposed to the broad rationale and have the opportunity to advocate their positions.‛[36]

Support � is ‚the relationship between bosses and subordinates defined by characteristics of coaching, helping, and guiding‌. it also frames the horizontal linkages amongst peers [and requires people to] voluntarily seek and provide assistance to colleagues‛ as the norm[37]. Support is the idea that people are not hung out to dry, and that the organisation does everything to help its people to succeed. ‚The problem is that after decades serving as loyal implementers of a classic hierarchy, most employees do not have the attitudes, common knowledge, or skills to allow them to take advantage of the new freedom made possible by such changes to the structure and systems. To allow these individuals to become real front-line entrepreneurs, companies must create a nurturing and supportive environment that develops the skills and builds the confidence of those being asked to take on this new role.‛[38] This can be achieved by:

• cross-unit and cross-functional interactions, with ‚increased access to company resources located outside of their own unit‛[39].
• radical decentralisation, emphasizing autonomy with ‚less control-focused and more help-orientated senior management‛[40], who take on a role of guidance, coaching and help.
• fostering freedom of initiative at lower levels.
• Management coaching — ‚the biggest source of failure in the transformational change in most companies is not that those on the front lines are unable to rise to the challenge of becoming more entrepreneurial but that their managers fail in their ability to give them the freedom and support to do so.‛
• Openness to challenge — ‚the most common cause of failure and success. Management become so proud of its past achievements and so wedded to the strategic logic and organisational capabilities that made them that it loses the ability to re-evaluate itself and revise its traditional approaches.‛ (pg 63). ‚The willingness and ability of individuals to challenge embedded policies or to question top management decisions is made much easier when the routine interactions across organisation levels are based on a coaching relationship rather than a relationship dominated by control.‛ (pg 64).
• Tolerance for failure â€? 3M’s adage goes, ‚You can only stumble when you are in motion.‛ They refer to well-intentioned failure. They know mistakes will be made, ‚but if a person is essentially right the mistakes he makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it is dictatorial and undertakes to tell those under its authority exactly how they must do the job. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made to kill initiative, and it is essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to grow.‛ (pg 65f) These were the words of 3M’s founder William McKnight.

These four elements are not blunt instruments or new versions ofsystems. They deal with attitudes,culture and ‚the smell of the place‛. Thus, ‚ultimately it is not the tools and initiatives but the quality ofmanagement in applying them that [will] contribute to the establishment of[each of the elements] as an established behaviour norm‌. management cannot beseparated from the message.‛[41] ‚While we have described each of theseattributes separately, they are neither independent nor static. Indeed, it is the interplay among thesedimensions and in the co-evolution of each that the whole dynamic ofself-renewal is created.‛[42]

Ghoshal and Bartlett do add some further complexity to their simplemodel, by indicating some of the interactions between the four elements theydescribe. ‚People learn to operate in anenvironment that is, on the one hand, highly disciplined and demanding yet, onthe other hand, also trusting and secure; an environment where expectations arestretched, ambitious, yet within a setting that is supportive and nurturing. And it is in the resolution of thesecomplementary yet often contradictory forces that the organisation develops theenergy and direction to drive its self-renewal process.‛[43]

6. New Processes Required

The phrase ‚self renewal‛ comes up often in the book. In fact, there are three specific processesthat Ghoshal and Bartlett believe should characterise the new type oforganisation: entrepreneurial processes, which produce and support opportunityseeking; integration processeses,which link dispersed resources, competencies and businesses of the companytogether, and ensure learnings are shared horizontally and well as vertically;and, renewal processes, which createand sustain the company’s capacity to continuously challenge its own beliefsand practices thereby revitalising the strategies that drive the business[44].

In linking these processes to the management context, they show that disciplineand support are essential to stimulate individual initiative andentrepreneurial behaviour. Trust is keyto engendering organisational learning and establishing horizontalintegration. Stretch is an energisingforce that drives continuous self renewal. They argue for a complete turnaround of traditional thinking ofmanagement tasks in this regard.

Front-line managers (sometimesreferred to as Operational Managers) mustbecome the primary initiators of entrepreneurial action, creating and pursuingnew opportunities for the company. ‚Inspiringindividual initiative requires that individuals feel a sense of ownership inwhat they do; this is achieved in small organizational units more easily thanin large ones.‛[45] Innovation is often seen as coming down fromExecutives, when it is more likely to happen at the customer interface, andshould become one of the primary responsibilities of operational management. Rewards and incentives must be put in placeto encourage front-line managers to stretch beyond their immediateresponsibilities, and also to play a role in challenging embedded assumptions. ‚Frontline managers, heading small,disaggregated, and interdependent units focused on specific opportunities, arethe company’s entrepreneurs. They arethe builders of the company’s businesses and competencies and take fullresponsibility for both the short-term and long-term performances of theunits. Importantly, they face out to anexternal environment with which they build strong contact and relationships,rather than upward into a hierarchy from which they expect direction andcontrol.‛[46]

Middle managers (sometimesreferred to as Senior Management) becomea key resource to the front-line managers, coaching and supporting them intheir activities and integrating their various activities across thebusiness. Thus middle managers play akey anchor role in the integration process. They must create and maintain credibility and trust in the entiresystem, displaying fairness and transparency, create a participative decision-makingcontext and design and manage the various horizontal coordination mechanismsrequired for knowledge and skills sharing across functional units. Middle managers become developmentalcoaches. ‚Like coaches who leverage thestrengths of individual players to build a winning team, middle level managerslink these separate businesses and leverage the resources and capabilitiesdeveloped in each of them. Overall, theyplay the role of capability developers - developing both the skills andcompetencies of the individual front-line managers through mentoring andguidance, and also the overall capabilities of the organisation by integratingthe diverse capabilities of the front-line units across businesses, functions,and countries.‛[47]

Top management (sometimesreferred to as Executives or Senior Executives) must becomeinstitution builders. Their primaryresponsibility is to energise and inspire the renewal process, in particular byserving as the source of organisational disequilibrium. They must focus on driving theentrepreneurial process more by developing a broad set of objectives andestablishing stretch performance standards that the front-line initiatives mustmeet. In the integration processes, theyhave a responsibility to attract and develop competencies and manageoperational inter-dependencies. ‚Topmanagement provides the foundation for this activity by infusing the companywith an energising purpose - a sense of ambition, a set of values, and overallidentity - so as to develop it as an institution that can outlive its existingoperations, opportunities, and executives. Like social leaders, top management creates the challenge and commitmentnecessary to drive change and ensure that the company continuously renewsitself. Rather than trying to controlstrategic content, top management focus is much more on shaping organisationalcontext.‛[48]

This new vision for different management levels can be summarised in thefollowing matrix[49]:

‚If a company is to become an Individualised Corporation, itsoperating-level managers must evolve from their traditional role as front-lineimplementers to become innovativeentrepreneurs; senior-level managers must convert themselves fromadministrative controllers todevelopmental coaches; and top-level executives are forced to seethemselves less as their companies’ strategic architects and more as their institution builders.‛[50]

Although the intention of the book is to provide an overall framework ofthought, rather than a how-to guide, chapter 8 outlines some of the keyactivities and tasks each level of management would need to come to grips within order to adapt as indicated above. The authors also point out that HR will also have new tasks. They specifically point out that formaltraining is a key component of most knowledge era companies, along withcoaching for skills mastery. ‚Indeed,this coaching role has become so important that it is now widely defined as acentral management responsibility, particularly at the senior level of theorganization.‛[51]

7. Getting From Here to There

Thetransformation task will be different for different companies and adapted tothe unique situations of each company. In the book, the authors use GE under Jack Welch as an example ofgeneral principles of change. ‚Successful transformation process is almost always followed a carefullyphased approach that focused on developing particular organisationalcapabilities in an appropriate sequence, [and] actual transformation occurredonly when the structural reconfiguration was reinforced by real and enduringchange in the behaviours of individuals within the organization.‛[52]

The three phases they identified are: rationalisation, which embeds the entrepreneurial process and isabout discipline and a focus on efficiency and smaller functional units whichdo less things better; revitalisation,which focuses on developing integrative synergies in a context of openness andcollaboration; regeneration, orcontinuous self renewal[53].

But the authors are not only concerned about the internal workings oforganisations. Their revision is evenbolder, and includes a rethinking of what companies can contribute to societyas a whole. ‚Amid a general decline inthe authority of other institutions � political parties, churches, thecommunity, even the family units � corporations have emerged as perhaps themost influential institution of modern society, not only in creating anddistributing a large part of its wealth but also providing a social context formost of its people, thereby acting as a source of individual satisfaction andsocial succour.‛[54]

In this type of environment to focus on the value of people and the value forpeople is critical. People are notmachines � they cannot be owned. Butthey have value to the company, specifically when they become specialised tothe company’s business and activities. There must be some incentive for the company to commit itself to thosepeople who can help it develop, just as there must be incentive for thoseindividuals to commit themselves to a company for a period of time.

‚It has, by now, become aclich� to claim that people are the key source of a company’s competitiveadvantage. But, in a literal sense, thiscannot be true in the long-term - at least not since slavery wasabolished. The only way people candirectly serve as the source of a company’s competitive advantage is if theyare exploited - in prison factories or sweatshops. In companies that pay a fair wagecommensurate with the individual competencies of their employees, the realsource of competitive advantage lies in the context - in the internalenvironment that allows people to individually and collectively create far morevalue than they could if they were employed elsewhere. If, as is often asserted, the key function ofmanagement is to help ordinary people produced extraordinary results and if[the] behaviours of people in the company can be so radically changed bychanging the internal behavioural context, then shaping that context isundeniably the principal task of managers and the best measure of the firm’squality of management.‛[55]

8. Conclusion

The biggest mistake that can be made in reading a book like The Individualized Corporation is tothink that the task of changing the corporate environment is all about findingthe ‚seven habits‛ or ‚21 laws‛ � that it’s about the tweaks and tricks thatcan get you easy wins. In reality, thisbook and others like it[56],represent a manifesto for a radical new way of doing business in theworld. It is nothing short ofrevolutionary if it is correctly understood.

Becoming one of these new type of organisations is a lot more about being than doing. This can be tough forleaders and managers who have not been brought up in this environment nor haveskills for it. But moving in thisdirection is critical to the future success of organisations in the 21^stcentury.