I recently started working at Hewlett Packard and Chris's description of a
company with "local autonomy", "governing ideas" and "free flow of
information" seems to describe things pretty well here.
Autonomous to the point where duplication of effort happens from division
to division. Not necessarily efficient in the short term, but perhaps
leading to "new information" in the long term.
HP's governing ideas are not just words and are used daily to guide
actions.
Information flows around here. People are very helpful in getting you
what you need, and there is a lot of management/worker communciations and
worker/worker communications within a division and between divisions.
It's not a perfect place (hard to define perfect), but it has some of the
qualities that Chris describes with results to show for it. Hats off to
Bill and Dave for starting HP with a great set of governing ideas.
Gregg Okunami
P.S. This has been my first entry after lurking for a few months.
--GREGG_OKUNAMI@hp-santaclara-om3.om.hp.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>