To be successful in today’s business world, companies need to demolish the figurative walls that prevent the flow of communication. With the walls gone, information can permeate the organization.
Such organizations find it easier to achieve the “Four F’s” that management expert Rosabeth Moss Kanter tells us are essential to business success. According to Kanter, a successful company must be focused, flexible, fast, and friendly.
- You can’t focus the efforts of your entire workforce if your organization is crisscrossed with walls that impede the flow of information.
- You can’t be flexible if you have a rigid corporate structure in which every division and department is a closed information loop.
- You can’t be fast if information has to seep slowly through layer after layer of management.
- And you can’t be friendly if your people don’t talk to other people inside and outside your organization.
If you look around, you may see plenty of boundaries in your own company that should be removed. One of them may be the door to your office that remains closed to input from your employees. Another might be a rigid boundary between hourly and salaried employees that keeps people in one category from talking freely with people in another. Or it could be a boundary that shuts out ideas that don’t originate in your own organization.
Other boundaries might be the lines that run between divisions of a corporation. If one division develops a new method or a new technology, does it keep it to itself or does it share it with other divisions? Among the toughest boundaries to dismantle are the ones individual managers erect around the borders of their turf.
In the old days, corporations became overpopulated with people who were promoted to their “levels of incompetence.” Armed with the word “manager” in their titles, they staked out their own little turfs and guarded them jealously.
In a corporation without boundaries, advancement means moving into positions in which knowledge can be put to productive use as coaches, advisors or knowledge workers; where expertise is interchanged throughout the organization.
