Redesigning Work and Organizations for the Digital Age

Redesigning Work and Organizations for the Digital Age

Derived from…
Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable
Previously
Related Reading to Seth Godin’s Linchpin

BR Context : Business and Work Map
Lets draw some loose threads together…
Linchpin is another piece in the puzzle that we’ve been tracking at Book Rapper through most of our issues.
It revolves around two questions:

1. What does ‘work’ look like in the digital age?
2. And, what does an ‘organization’ look like in the digital age?

The starting point for this conversation is:

If you were designing work/organizations from scratch today, what would you create? How would it look?

Here’s eight design principles for todays work and organizations linked back to the Book Rapper issues that discuss these topics.

1 Leadership
Command and control leadership styles have flowed from the military.
In a decentralized world, they no longer works.
For instance, you can’t control the internet.
To be a leader here you need to build trust, respect and reputation.
Lighthouse Leadership is a very different way of looking at the world and interacting with people.
And, with generational change, the old leadership styles are less tolerated, further prompting new styles.

References

• Leaderful (Decentralized leadership)
• Web Line (The shift to online leadership)

2 Decentralized
The internet is the defining and all pervasive structure of modern society.
Any new organization would reflect this and be decentralized in its design and structure.
Or, at least be a fusion of centralized control and decentralized flexibility.
There are two basic ways of doing this:

1. Either separate business units that run independently of it’s parent company, like GE.
2. Or you can decentralize the customer experience, like Ebay.

This presents significant benefits with regard to building to scale through network effects especially through internet technologies.

References

• Leaderful (Decentralized organizations)
• The Great Business Gestalt (Network effects)

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