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Chapter 1
The Evolution and Future of Corporate Business Structures
In 1991, Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics after a lifetime of influence that began with the 1937 publication of his renowned paper entitled “The Nature of the Firm.” In this paper, Coase asked (and then answered) the lofty question of why corporations form in a free market economy. Coase's point was simple: If there really are free and efficient markets, then a corporation can get any service it wants from a free market of independent contractors. Despite this free market, however, he cited the range of additional costs related to searching for, contracting, coordinating, and eventually paying for these services. And he showed how these costs ultimately made it more expensive to secure services in the open market versus bringing them in-house.
Coase went on to say you could measure the size of a firm by the number of contractual relations it creates, and by the number managed internally versus externally. As a result of the added expense related to external relationships, he showed how companies could then bring more and more of their contractual relationships inside in order to gain efficiencies and lower their transaction costs. This approach is what drove the creation of big, vertically integrated corporations in the twentieth century. That was the world according to Coase in 1937.
Today, a company is still motivated to bring more and more of its transactions in-house, but only until the cost savings gained are offset by other costs. Those other costs come in the form of management information overload and the resulting inefficiencies in decision making and allocation of assets.
Many companies are now bumping up against those limits. In particular, with the spread of the wireless Internet, mobile computing and business application services delivered over the Internet, it is becoming easier and less expensive to manage external contractual relationships and transactions. Instead of being optimized for internally focused inside-out communications, companies are being transformed and reoptimized for outside-in communications.
The classic hierarchical organization structure of twentieth century companies is being redesigned and this gives rise to the network organization structure of the virtual enterprise. In the virtual enterprise the activities performed internally are those that directly add value to the company's products and which its customers pay it for doing.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a former co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee under Presidents Clinton and Bush, a visiting lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management, a strategic advisor to Fortune 100 companies, and a former IBM senior executive. He describes today's environment like this:
Since we can now use technology, the Internet and open standards to begin to automate, standardize and integrate business processes, those transaction costs described by Ronald Coase are dropping precipitously. Consequently, the whole nature of the firm, and what it means to run an efficient business, is going through very extensive changes. These are not easy changes. Not only is there a great deal of innovation required to automate and integrate business processes, but perhaps more important, there are even greater changes in culture required to transform Industrial Age business models to something more appropriate to our Internet era.1
By having common standards for common transactions like purchase orders, order processing, billing, accounts payable, and so on, firms gain tremendous flexibility and they can change and adapt easily as situations evolve. Weaving technology into these transactions, and combining them with common service delivery standards, improves a company's ability to deal with a wider ecosystem of service providers. This enables companies to shift their culture and their processes so they have access to the talent and services as the need arises.
This redefines the basic culture of the firm. This notion of learning how to collaborate has become a key driver of wealth creation. Firms learn to live in their marketplace or they lose touch with their customers and cannot follow them as needs and desires change. With industrial technology the object is efficiency and low cost, with service technology the object is customer satisfaction in whatever form that may take for the markets being served.
Example of a New Corporate Organization Structure
The days of the traditional pyramid-shaped corporate hierarchy as a viable business model are coming to an end. The past 20 years have produced some winners and some losers, and some of the biggest losers are companies that built themselves into huge conglomerates that were supposed to be too big to fail. Instead they are proving the truth of the saying, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
It's not that companies can't be big and grow revenue to many billions of dollars. It's that they have to swear off that fatal tendency to organize themselves as hierarchical pyramids where most people are powerless drones who just follow orders while the important decisions are made by a small group of powerful executives at the top of the pyramid. Given the pace of change, companies need something more agile and responsive. As shown in Figure 1.1, an inevitable consequence of organizations using the pyramid-shaped hierarchy is that there is a decision-making bottleneck at the top of the organization. No small group of executives, regardless of their smarts, hard work, or sophisticated computer systems, can make all those decisions in a timely or competent manner.
People at the top of corporate hierarchies are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of decisions they have to make; they are too far away from the scene of the action to really understand what's happening; and by the time decisions are made the actions are usually too little and too late. Companies suffer the consequences of this performance by staggering from one bad decision to another like punch-drunk boxers who can't understand what's happening and can't understand why they keep getting hit.
Cisco Systems got hit hard in the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2002 when their stock went from around $77 a share to around $11. But they took that opportunity to learn some lessons that many other companies are only now starting to consider. Because human nature is what it is, it often takes a “smack-up-side-of-the-head” event to send a wake-up call and get us to consider new ideas and try out new ways of doing things.
The good news is that we really can learn from mistakes when we decide to do so. Cisco used to be a traditional pyramid-shaped corporate hierarchy where all the important decisions were made by a small group of senior executives at the top of the organization chart. Then they fell on hard times. What has emerged in the past several years is an agile enterprise with a network organization structure (see Figure 1.2) where decision making is decentralized out to some 500 managers and the whole operation is powered by Internet-based collaborative technologies like blogs and wikis and social media tools, some of which they have built themselves.
Now instead of a small group of executives telling everybody else what to do, people have authority to figure out for themselves what to do. People are motivated to coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate with each other by a financial incentive system that rewards them for their common successes instead of rewarding each manager for their individual successes.
Cisco's CEO John Chambers makes the case that Cisco's new business model is “the best possible model for how a large, global business can operate: as a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by central command.”2 Cisco is also sharing what they've learned with big customers like AT&T, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble.
Is there a winning business model here that other companies could put to use? What kind of IT systems architecture would best support this type of business model?
Model of a Responsive Organization
The business model used by Cisco and other responsive organizations is to give their business units a high degree of autonomy in how they reach their business goals and encourage them to constantly explore their markets and look for new opportunities. The business units in these companies are organized as networks instead of hierarchies simply because network organization structures allow for greater business unit autonomy.
These companies support their network organization structure of autonomous business units by using a shared services model. In this model there is a central enterprise coordination unit that sets goals and overall strategy and provides the other business units with administrative, finance, and systems support services. This frees the business units from taking on those tasks and those expenses so they can focus on the activities that generate revenue. This also enables the company to take advantage of economies of scale in delivering these support services.3
As they grow, these companies keep their organizations from evolving into rigid hierarchies by following a practice of forming new business units to pursue new products and markets. Instead of letting one original business unit get larger and larger as it grows its business and enters new markets, that original business unit takes on the role of the enterprise coordinator for a host of new business units. And these new units handle the growth of existing businesses and the expansion into new markets. This is illustrated in Figure 1.3.
The evolution of corporate organization structures like this is driven by the convergence of economic necessities with technological capabilities. The need to be responsive to evolving customer needs and desires creates networks where decision making is pushed out to operating units closest to the scene of the action. And these network operating structures are supported by a mix of telecommunication and computing technologies that enable services to be delivered anywhere at any time over the Internet.
This mix of technologies and services is now known as “the cloud” or as “cloud computing.” The industry research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) defines cloud computing as “Consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet.”4
In the words of an article entitled “The Long Nimbus” published by the Economist magazine about the impact of cloud computing on company organization structures, “Businesses are becoming more like the technology itself: more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialized. These developments may not be new, but cloud computing will speed them up.”5
These trends combine to produce companies and operating procedures that are much more fluid and flexible than what came before. Instead of procedures moving in a predictable straight-line fashion from start to finish (as in linear assembly lines), business processes now move in patterns that are circular and iterative and constantly adjusting to meet changing circumstances. These new processes are not industrial in nature; they are cybernetic in nature.
A Cybernetic Economy
Jeremy Rifkin is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program and has spent 10 years as an advisor to the European Union. He is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and author of several bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, and the environment. He is also the principal architect of the European Union's “Third Industrial Revolution” economic sustainability plan, which addresses the triple challenges of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. His most recent book is The Empathic Civilization.6
In this book he states that the Internet and mobile computing and digital media are giving rise to what he calls the third industrial revolution and business models that are “cybernetic, not linear.” Instead of the linear, start and stop assembly line model of the twentieth century's second industrial revolution, business is now about access to services instead of ownership of products. Business is no longer about transactions that record one-time purchases but is instead about “an ongoing commercial relationship between parties over time.”7
Instead of purchasing music CDs, customers now buy membership in organizations that provide them with access to huge libraries of music, which they can access for their personal use. Instead of buying a car, many people are turnin...
