Managing in the Virtual or Network(ed) Organization
by Jon Husband
During my blogging over the past four years I have pointed several times previous to an article in The Economist from January 2006 titled The New Organization (The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organised lags far behind.
The author’s main point is that while most organizations are now effectively functioning as and in networks, their organizational structures and management practices have been slow to make that shift, in a comprehensive sense.
(The Economist article is now behind a pay wall, but I think there must be copies here and there on the Web … it’s a very well-researched and well-written artyicle and worth the time to search for it and read it).
What initially caught my eye in that article (more than other useful points and references) were quotes from the major management consulting firms Mercer-Delta and McKinsey about this fundamental and permanent shift.
Their presence and substance was a signal to me that the types of large-scale changes (to work and to organizational structures and dynamics) about which I and others have written are still more on the horizon than amidst us, though they are rapidly moving to the foreground; witness the rapidly-growing interest in yet another (still) confusing-to-many term, Enterprise 2.0.
These global management consulting firms will move into this area full force .. they can’t NOT do so.
All that is well and good, and I am sure that they will find and create maps and models and diagnostics and workshops and full-blown strategies, and will capture their markets with prescriptive approaches … that’s what their business models demand.
What I wanted to draw any reader’s attention to is the work of a brilliant friend of mine, who has written and published a clear and concise exploration of the structure and dynamics of virtual, or network(ed) organizations that I think is seminal. He wisely chose the Linux Project as the initiative from which to draw inferences about decentralized organization.
I think that the next decade (or two) will see many of the points he sets out adopted and commoditized into management practices and processes, under more euphemistic and saleable names.
His name is george dafermos, and his paper is titled "Management and Virtual Decentralised Networks". In my opinion it should be required reading for management consultants and line managers / executives working with or in 21st century organizations.
He also wrote "Blogging The Market – How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations" several years ago, more of a cri du coeur at a time when blogging was still fresh and (perhaps) innocent 
Essentially, it was a short-form of the book "Naked Conversations – How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers" two or three years before Naked Conversations was written.
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