Next Century: The New Nature of Business

So you're growing your company. Like most companies you see that the problem needs to be approached with a task driven and practical strategy. Also it can only be done by the people with technical qualifications for it...and you'd be wrong.

Now I am not saying to throw technical skills out of the window. That would be just silly. The right person for the right job. But since the first inception of how should organize our companies, things haven't changed much since the fifties; people still cling on to the idea running a business is like a machine. Your first instinct says the machine needs a bolt, dynamo, chip or cog.

The irony is that if you treat your company that way, people will start behaving like bolts, dynamos, chips and cogs. Our whole culture towards business is an assumption that, like product pipelines, people go in and result comes out. Try this for once; ask yourself and then others why this is regarded as the best way to run a company? Go on, try. 

they have been winging it all along

You will find out that no-one really has specific answer. The answer will involve a bit of ridicule, the mainstay of people who feel uncomfortable about the unbeaten path, and the set-in-stone assumption that 'it has been always been like that'. Because questioning our business structure is like undercutting the 'amazing' results of our most successful ventures in economy. 

I understand, I do truly do. Perhaps it is because I am an uncurable non-conformist who spent to much time with modern startups. I mean who would not fall in line when a Forbes 500 company says it should be taken seriously? But trust me, they have been winging it all along on how they organize people. Each of those businesses started out differently and now the difference between Facebook, Google or Apple is as diverse as African wildlife.

Here's the bull and there's the china shop; our succes in the way we organize business does not mean it can't be done better. Even more so, if financial success of a business depended on how we organized it, almost all companies you know would have not existed. Success is determined by other factors which have much more of an impact [Bill Gross: the single biggest reason why startups succeed] then organisational structures.

No, I am also not saying that certain lessons we can learn from successful companies should be ignored. But what works for them does not necessarily work for you or anyone else. To drive to point home, we have been doing business a long time but that it works is more dependent on timing, the people and the idea than how things are organized. 

Okay, what's the big idea?
Let's omit timing as well the idea for the moment and focus on team. The cogs, bolts and wheels. Now our ideas of businesses is based on old school pyramids and assembly line thinking. Everyone has a task that need to be performed and if that tasks is done well, the business will succeed. However, these are not machines doing it, something else is doing it that is much more amazing and better; people. 

People are always looking for purpose out of curiosity, they have a monopoly on creativity and cooperation has made humans so successful as a species.
Which is why most businesses are run, viewed from the founders top down, so painfully ironic: People, who inherently are cooperative, are put in to a little box inside a box because a) they won't cooperate to serve the business b) you have to pay them else your dream of changing the world won't happen because they won't get behind the dream of changing the world for the better.

"It is a huge waste of energy, money and time telling people exactly what they should be doing naturally in the first place"

If you like it or not; the way a business is run is not people doing tasks or being forced to do those tasks together, they chose to work because they like working with certain people and doing certain tasks. To have a structure where people get behind an idea, making the business more innovative and fluid you have to take into account how people take personal choices. The current way of organizing does exactly the opposite; what it does is create a situation where natural human cooperation is suppressed. 

The shift comes from employees and employers; regarding and hiring each other as independent entrepreneurs who own their task. You may think that would be a costly enterprise but it is a huge waste of energy, money and time telling people exactly what they should be doing naturally in the first place. We should seriously start considering why people do a job and how the team works together. Proactivity, change makers, ideas and enthusiasm come if you create the conditions for it.  

I also say this because business is developing quicker than it used too. These businesses are listening, growing, learning and more fluid than the old ones; using lateral, design thinking [Business Model inc] to critique themselves. Technological tools that are available for businesses are also more prolific and developing faster. Growing a business [McKinsey] means you have to start thinking from the beginning to the end what it means to structure a business. Not only why you are behind your company but why others should be too.