Willard Jule wrote:
>
> As usual, Rol has sent us some food for thought re: flat and steep.
> Everything he says in his most recent posting seems reasonable to me.
> This is not to say that it has to seem reasonable to me, I just want to
> put in context my next nit-picky comment.
>
> Rol wrote,
>
> "Otherwise, there would be examples of totally flat organizations -- 1
> layer -- that would be successful in their niches."snip........>
> I also think that virtual orgs may be examples. When teams come together
> on a project basis and dissolve into the night when the project is
> complete, it seems to me that they are flat teams. The only "hierarchy"
> being the organizing value proposition that brought the team members
> together.
As an employee of a small (40MM) business, I was active as our company's
representative to the incipient "Agile Web", a virtual organization
project funded mostly by ARPA. Willard's comments on the flat teams was
true. I was a staffer operating with CEO's, other staffers, and some line
managers and our meetings were always visibly flat. The team was one of
equals. In the two years that I worked with the Web, we came up with a
vialble marketing and operations plan and actually took on some business
successfully.
When I left the corporate world, I called on some of the companies I had
worked with in the Web. Most of them were very different as a company
than they seemed in the team environment of the Web. The vertical lines
were drawn in heavy marker! The concepts of Agility and Virtually were
applied, in the main, only at the macro level. Internal policies and
procedures remained unchanged. There are a few exceptions, true examples
of emerging organizational learning and some very creative uses of
information technology. If the Agile Web survives, it will do so through
the example and teaching of the few rubbing off on the many.
-- jzavacki@epix.net John Zavacki The Wolff Group 900 James Avenue Scranton, PA 18510 Phone: 717-346-1218 Fax: 717-346-1388