Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Network Architectures in Business

technology :: business


No, I don't mean Foundry, Cisco, cat5, or lattency - I mean
people. I mean corporate structure... NEW corporate structure. Rohit
Anand (a friend of mine who from Techspan who is consulting for PBS
right now) and I were jamming about business, project management,
application development, and people management the other day. It was a
really great brainstorm. In my mind, the pivotal part of the
conversation was when we started talking about networks of motivated
people doing business.



The idea was that the corporate structure of today tends to crush
many motivated, highly skilled, high-energy individuals. Yet, at the
same time, many of these individuals don't really want to own a company
and all the headaches that come with this. So, what about changing the
corporate hierarchy? What about moving from the bifurcations we see on
org charts to clusters of management like you see in a neural net?



Certainly bears thinking about...



On a semi-side note, this brings be to my favorite business topic:
biology. One of my favorite things to do is look at business situations
and imagine a biological/ecological analog. It is my firm beliefe that
in the world of business, we are multi-cellular, though invertibrate
organisms. We have not developed to the point where we are thinking in
wholistic, systems terms. We don't think in terms of economies, we
think in terms of CEOs. We still think of the one cell, not all the
cells, the organism.


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