The Boundaryless Organization E-Book

Ron Ashkenas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 589

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In 1995 The Boundaryless Organization showed companies how to sweep away the artificial obstacles-such as hierarchy, turf, and geography-that get in the way of outstanding business performance. Now, in this completely revised edition of their groundbreaking work, management experts Ron Ashkenas, Dave Ulrich, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr offer an up-to-date version of their comprehensive guide to help any organization go "boundaryless"-and become a company with the ability to quickly, proactively, and creatively adjust to changes in the environment. With new examples, a new commentary on the developments of the last five years, and illuminating first-hand accounts from pioneering senior executives, the authors once again show why "boundaryless" is a prerequisite for any organization trying to succeed in the economy of the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Foreword by C. K. Prahalad

The Search for High Performance

From Asset Management to Resource Leverage

Creating the Organization of the Future

Foreword by Lawrence A. Bossidy

Preface

The Essence of a Boundaryless World

Origins of the Concept

One Boundaryless Organization

Flexibility Across Boundaries

A New Edition of

The Boundaryless Organization

Is This Book for You?

Acknowledgments

The Authors

Chapter One: A New World Order

Boundaryless Behavior: The Art of the Fluid

A Changing Paradigm for Organizational Success

Four Boundaries

Permeability in Action

Get Ready for Resistance

Making It Happen: Getting the Most from This Book

Part One: Free Movement Up and Down

Chapter Two: Toward a Healthy Hierarchy

The Persistent Vertical Organization

Reframing the Debate

Sticky Switches: Myths About Creating a Healthy Hierarchy

Getting Started: How Healthy Is Your Hierarchy?

Chapter Three: Rewiring and Retuning the Hierarchy

Wiring the Components for Vertical Boundary Change

Tuning the System

Shifting Authority to the Point of Impact: Who Decides What

Putting It All Together: How Do You Know It’s Working?

Part Two: Free Movement Side to Side

Chapter Four: Beyond Turf and Territory

Boxes, Boxes, Boxes

Haywire Horizontal Boundaries

Centralization Versus Decentralization: The Swinging Pendulum

Reframing the Question: From Structure to Process

Making It Happen: Principles for Creating Horizontal Harmony

The Service Model of Horizontal Harmony

Horizontal Harmony in Other Organizations

Creating Horizontal Harmony: Overcoming the Immune Response

Getting Started: How Haywire Are Your Horizontal Boundaries?

Chapter Five: Integrating Resources to Serve the Customer

Orient Work Around Core Processes

Tackle Processes Through Targeted Teams

Turn Vertical Dimensions Sideways

Create Shared Services for Support Processes

Two Types Of Shared Services

Shared Services in Action: An Evolutionary Approach

Develop Organizational Learning Capability

Generate and Generalize Ideas with Impact

Putting It All Together: Harmony on the Horizontal

Part Three: Free Movement Along the Value Chain

Chapter Six: Toward Partnership with Customers and Suppliers

The Value Chain: The Traditional View

The Search for an Alternative Model

Moving the Value Chain from East to West

Refocusing the Lens: A Rising Tide Raises All Boats

Barriers to Boundaryless Customer-Supplier Relationships

From There to Here, from Here to There/Funny Things Are Everywhere

Getting Started: How Well Linked Is Your Organization’s Value Chain?

Chapter Seven: Strengthening the Value Chain

Getting Started Actions

Building Momentum Actions

Sustaining Progress Actions

Making It Happen: Permeating External Boundaries

Part Four: Free Global Movement

Chapter Eight: Toward the Global Corporation

Why Go Global?

From Intention to Implementation: Challenges for the Globally Minded

Crossing Global Boundaries: How Much Progress Have You Made?

Chapter Nine: Actions for Global Learners, Launchers, and Leaders

From Global Learner to Global Launcher

Global Launchers to Global Leaders

The Global Village of Tomorrow

Chapter Ten: Conclusion: Leading Toward the Boundaryless Organization

Leadership Change Challenges

Learning from Experience: Leadership Leverage Points

Making It Happen: An Evolutionary Process and an Evolutionary Attitude

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

List of Illustrations

Chapter One: A New World Order

Questionnaire #1 Stepping Up to the Line: How Boundaryless Is Your Organization?

Chapter Two: Toward a Healthy Hierarchy

Questionnaire #2 Stepping Up to the Line: How Healthy Is Your Organization’s Hierarchy?

Chapter Three: Rewiring and Retuning the Hierarchy

Figure 3.1. Aligning Communication.

Figure 3.2. Sample Communication and Training Plan.

Figure 3.3. Model for Competence Audit.

Figure 3.4. Wiring and Tuning Dimensions for Creating Healthy Hierarchies.

Chapter Four: Beyond Turf and Territory

Questionnaire #3 Stepping Up to the Line: How Congruent Are Your Organization’s Horizontal Boundaries?

Chapter Five: Integrating Resources to Serve the Customer

Figure 5.1. GE Capital Purchasing Process Map.

Figure 5.2. Selecting a Shared Services Approach.

Figure 5.3. Creating a Learning Culture.

Exhibit 5.1. J.P. Morgan & Co. Responsibility Matrix.

Exhibit 5.2. J.P. Morgan & Co. Implementation Process Map.

Exhibit 5.3. Team Effectiveness Checklist.

Chapter Six: Toward Partnership with Customers and Suppliers

Questionnaire #4 Stepping Up to the Line: How Well Linked Is Your Organization’s Value Chain?

Chapter Seven: Strengthening the Value Chain

Figure 7.1. Needs Map: Fast-Food Example.

Figure 7.2. Agenda for IBM’s “Consulting Skills Workshop.”

Figure 7.3. GE Lighting Stock Replenishment Process.

Exhibit 7.1. Sample Agenda for Senior Management Meeting

Exhibit 7.2. What Aspects of the Buyer-Supplier Relationship Are Most Important?

Chapter Eight: Toward the Global Corporation

Exhibit 8.1. A U.S. Company’s Perceptions of Its French Partner

Questionnaire #5 Stepping Up to the Line: How Far Along the Path to Globalization Is Your Organization?

Chapter Ten: Conclusion: Leading Toward the Boundaryless Organization

Questionnaire #6 Stepping Up to the Line: Are You a Boundaryless Leader?

List of Tables

Chapter Five: Integrating Resources to Serve the Customer

Table 5.1. Targeted Teams: How to Choose the Right Type.

Table 5.2. Differences Between Centralized and Shared Services.

Chapter Six: Toward Partnership with Customers and Suppliers

Table 6.1. Changing Value Chain Assumptions for Boundaryless Organizations.

Chapter Seven: Strengthening the Value Chain

Table 7.1. Creating Boundaryless Relationships with Customers and Suppliers

Chapter Nine: Actions for Global Learners, Launchers, and Leaders

Table 9.1. Alcatel Bell’s Globalization

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The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series

The Boundaryless Organization

Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure

Revised and Updated

Ron Ashkenas

Dave Ulrich

Todd Jick

Steve Kerr

C. K. Prahalad

Lawrence A. Bossidy

Copyright © 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The boundaryless organization : breaking the chains of organizational structure / Ron Ashkenas . . . [et al.] ; forewords by C. K. Prahalad and Lawrence A. Bossidy.— 2nd ed.

p. cm. — (The Jossey-Bass business & management series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7879-5943-X (alk. paper)

1. Organizational change. 2. Industrial organization. 3. Interorganizational relations. 4. Partnership. I. Ashkenas, Ronald N. II. Series.

HD58.8 .B675 2002

658.4'063—dc21

2001006128

Foreword

C. K. Prahalad

The new business environment imposes new demands on managers. They have to engage in a fundamental reexamination of strategies, both at the corporate and at the business levels, as well as reassess the capabilities of their organizations to execute the new and often complex strategies. Most managers have little appetite for either fundamentally rethinking strategy or creating radically new organizational capabilities. Both tasks require a capacity to forget as well as a capacity to learn; they require tools for honest assessment of where one is and a capacity to conceive where one ought to be.

The process of reexamining and reinventing the company demands a new organizational theory and, at the same time, a critical evaluation of the limits of existing theory. It requires the capacity to think long term and, at the same time, create the financial and the organizational space for change through efficiencies. It is the appetite for this process of reexamining and reinventing that will separate the builders (leaders) from caretakers and the undertakers (managers and cautious administrators).

The Search for High Performance

Under pressure for performance in a changing competitive environment, managers seem to gravitate toward improving the efficiency of existing organizational arrangements and implementing existing strategies. This is “doing what I know” better. Hence, the current managerial preoccupation with “implementation.” However, in different companies, a focus on implementation means different things, from downsizing to reengineering to various forms of “cultural change” programs. In the absence of clear guideposts, we see a wide proliferation of tools and fads that promise a simple cure-all. Yet the evidence is that even very popular implementation tools have not been unqualified successes. Moreover, all these initiatives consume an enormous amount of organizational energy.

The need for a comprehensive framework, a theory, to sort out fads from useful initiatives is obvious. Managers building a high-performance firm need a framework that enables them to evaluate initiatives, sequence them, and recognize the risks and time frames they involve.

The Boundaryless Organization provides an excellent start to the process of discovering the essential building blocks of organizations that can cope with the complex strategies needed in the future. Implicit in the message of this book is the strategic imperative of competitive success: traditional notions of efficiency, such as quality of asset management, are not enough. We need to go beyond them and develop a new managerial scorecard.

From Asset Management to Resource Leverage

Beset by the new competitive reality, firms typically start to focus on better asset management (reduction of working capital) as well as on reduction of investment requirements by selective outsourcing. However, vitality in the medium to longer term comes not from asset reduction but from resource leverage. Managers must be able to get a bigger bang for the buck, better commercial results from the infrastructure in which they have invested. The brands, patents and technology, global supply base, physical infrastructure, and competencies that the collective and shared learning of the organization represents—that is, the physical and the invisible, intellectual resources of the firm—need to be leveraged. The reusing of intellectual assets to create new businesses and new sources of competitive advantage is a process of discovering hidden wealth and requires a new management process. The Boundaryless Organization implicitly accepts the need for resource leverage. The authors suggest four dominant themes that are critical to such leverage: speed (not size), flexibility (not rigidity, often disguised as role clarity), integration (not specialization), and innovation (not control).

Most often, the reason managers do not move beyond asset management to resource leverage is that the latter requires new ways of managing. The essence of such leverage is learning, sharing knowledge, redeploying knowledge, and bundling physical and intellectual assets in new and creative ways. Therefore, the capacity to transcend current administrative boundaries is a critical precondition for resource leverage. That boundary spanning, or creating of “boundaryless” behavior, is the substance of this book. The Boundaryless Organization is about the “how” of strategy.

Creating the Organization of the Future

Basing their findings on their extensive experience in working with senior managers of some of the best-known firms, the authors identify four essential boundaries to be spanned. These include hierarchical levels (breaking the tyranny of the vertical, status-driven boundaries), interunit divisions (breaking functional, business unit, and other horizontal boundaries driven by specialization, expertise, and socialization), barriers between internal and external organizations (breaking the boundary between the customer and the organization), and finally, global differences (breaking the boundaries between geographic markets and cultures). In large, well-established organizations such as GE, General Motors, Sears, and IBM, each one of these boundaries was an integral part of the management process. Call them bureaucracy, internal governance, or administrative heritage, these boundaries were real, and implicitly defined the range of competitive options available to each firm. It is no surprise, therefore, that these organizations were unable to adapt speedily to the changing competitive realities. A lack of organizational capacity to reconfigure physical and intellectual resources in new and creative ways—not as resources per se—had become their primary source of competitive weakness. GE was one of the first to realize the suffocating effects of the traditional boundary-based approaches to managing, effects that inhibited the organization’s ability to leverage resources. GE initiated a process for systematically creating a “boundaryless” organization. The authors’ experience is derived significantly from their work on this process, initially at GE and subsequently at other firms as well.

Boundaryless behavior is not about eliminating all administrative procedures and rules. It is about reducing the threshold of pain when creating new patterns of collaboration, learning, and productive work. It is about removing the restrictions, real and imaginary, imposed on individuals and teams by formal structures. Boundarylessness is about boundary spanning; it is about substituting permeable structures for concrete walls.

The Boundaryless Organization is organized in a user-friendly manner. The authors follow a simple structure to articulate their complex message about each of the four boundaries:

A logical reason for the need to reexamine the effects of a specific kind of organizational boundary (for example, vertical boundaries, or the hierarchy).

A method (an instrument) with which you can assess the state of your company along this dimension (for example, how hierarchy-bound your organization is).

A brief history of how this kind of boundary evolved. What were the theoretical underpinnings behind the organizing idea?

The consequences of the condition. When does an organizational practice become a pathology? (For example, hierarchy-based management was fine in slow-moving businesses, but in businesses that need quick response time and flexibility, hierarchies can become pathologies.)

The steps that can be taken to break old patterns and create the new patterns of boundaryless behavior (for example, creating a shared mindset).

The benefits to the organization from this approach.

Two themes dominate the book. First, creating a boundaryless organization takes time and perseverance. It takes repetition. It takes small acts, symbols, course corrections, coaching, and celebrations. It is not without pain. It takes training. It should involve all people in the organization. Most often, these simple and, at the same time, profound lessons are not well understood by leaders. Reinventing the company is not about a single initiative; neither is it an off-line activity. It is on-line, involves multiple initiatives, and is cumulative.

The second theme is that success in current business is critical to provide necessary space and confidence to the organization. Focusing on business results is critical as a management group attempts to reinvent itself. Change not anchored in business results is likely to drift. Strategy provides the anchor and the rationale for reinventing the company.

These two underlying themes, so often missing in books on change and transformation, make this a book for line managers as much as a guide for HR professionals. The focus is on general management in a changing marketplace.

The Boundaryless Organization is a very important contribution to the emerging thinking on preparing for competing in the future.

Ann Arbor, Michigan July 1995

C. K. PrahaladCoauthor of Competing for the Future; Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Michigan

Foreword

Lawrence A. Bossidy

Nobody argues anymore with the notion that what it takes to succeed today is radically different from what it took yesterday and that tomorrow’s success factors will be different as well. The speed of changes in the global market in an age of accelerating technological innovation means that there are no longer any certainties. New products and competitors emerge almost overnight, and the half-life of market strategies shrinks almost daily. It is the kind of environment in which great companies can be humbled very quickly—but where nimble, creative, and courageous organizations can thrive as never before.

To succeed in this environment, leaders need to rethink the traditional ways that work gets done. Whoever can contribute value—whether he or she is a production worker, middle manager, specialist, vendor, customer, or senior executive—needs to be encouraged to collaborate with others and make things happen, without waiting for some central authority to give permission. The old questions of status, role, organizational level, functional affiliation, and geographic location, all the traditional boundaries that we have used for years to define and control the way we work, are much less relevant than getting the best people possible to work together effectively.

For many organizations, this concept of boundaryless behavior sounds threatening and risky. After all, it means transferring decision-making authority away from executives and out to frontline workers; it means listening to customers and changing our products and delivery systems to meet their needs; it means forming partnerships with suppliers rather than just telling them what to do; and it means establishing coalitions with other parts of the company rather than defending turf. And when all this is taken together, it means that the role of manager, executive, and leader changes drastically—from controller and authority figure to stimulator, catalyst, cheerleader, and coach. So it is not an easy shift. However, in the environment of the twenty-first century, making such a shift is no longer a choice.

During my years as CEO of AlliedSignal, and now Honeywell, we have been working to make this kind of boundaryless transformation, not only in our management team but throughout the company. It has not painless or easy. Nor is the transformation complete. We still get hung up on titles, status, roles, rules, functions, and geographic differences that divide us rather than bring us together with each other and with our customers. But by becoming more boundaryless, we have been able to establish and achieve new standards of excellence. And most important, we are becoming far more capable of succeeding in an unpredictable future.

If your organization is ready for this kind of transformation, The Boundaryless Organization will provide a simple but provocative framework either for getting started or for accelerating the pace. At AlliedSignal, I asked all of our managers to read it, to learn from the rich cases that it contains, and to use the tools that might be helpful to them, and I am doing the same at the new Honeywell. But make no mistake, this is not a cookbook or a how-to guide. Too many managers today are looking for the quick-fix elixir that will make them winners overnight. It does not exist, either in this book or elsewhere. The authors of The Boundaryless Organization rightly argue that we do not need new buzzwords about organization but new ways of thinking about our organizations. As such a new way of thinking, this book is not a solution but a set of ideas that should cause all managers to rethink how they get work done.

In the final analysis, there is no substitute for your own creativity and leadership, for your creation of your own boundaryless agenda. And that is the uniqueness of The Boundaryless Organization. It is not a prescription but a challenge. It is up to you to take advantage of it.

Morristown, New Jersey October 2001

Lawrence A. BossidyChairman and Chief Executive Officer, Honeywell Corporation

Preface

In the five years since The Boundaryless Organization first appeared, we have seen the themes it describes play out time after time on the organizational stage. Firms that managed to loosen their boundaries and operate with greater speed, flexibility, and innovation have tended to be more successful at navigating the white water of the global economy. Conversely, organizations that have maintained more rigid internal and external boundaries have struggled.

At the same time, the world continues to change with lightning speed. When we wrote The Boundaryless Organization in 1993 and 1994, the Internet was just beginning to enter our consciousness. E-mail had not yet become a way of life, and globe-spanning wireless communication was only a dream for most people. Since then, thousands of dot-com companies full of entrepreneurial energy have burst on the scene. And though many have fallen by the wayside, together they have heralded the dawn of a new economic and organizational era. People struggling to define the new reality constantly refer to virtual, networked, wired, horizontal, knowledge-based organizations.