Over at TheAppGap I recently wrote about Transforming Organizations: Participative Media & the Power to Convene and made the case that in many organizations leadership resists adoption of low cost collaboration tools because it challenges traditional notions of control.
December 2's Financial Times brings a story, sourced from Gary Hamel's "Future of Management" about Gore-Tex that adopted a flat, decentralized structure, nearly 5 decades ago. Founder Bill Gore was inspired by a 1960 book "The Human Side of the Enterprise" that discussed X and Y management theories. Gore chose Y where "managers believe that people are self-motivated and keen to find meaning in their work."
The Gore-Tex article, that includes an interview with current chief executive Terri Kelly who was selected through an "associate" peer review process, is recommended reading. The following quotes particularly caught my attention:
"Giving up power and actually tapping into the knowledge and not being a person that's in control, is scary"
and
"We vote with our feet. If you call a meeting and people show up, you're a leader."
Under a subhead "Wacky companies around the world" the article sidebar bullet points Hamel's profiles of Whole Foods, Semco, and Google. Reading the management principles these companies practice, from Whole Foods giving frontline employees decisionmaking control over what to stock, to Semco's dismantled HQ and Google's "continuous, company-wide conversation" it seems to me if this is "wacky" then more companies should be so defining themselves. What do you think?
~ Jenny Ambrozek
