The new (dis)organization

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world." - John LeCarre

The reason that Starbucks became such a sensation is that it's the new "third place." The old third places - the pub, VFW hall, and country club - all had declined in appeal or importance. Starbucks became that other place, between home and work.

What got me thinking about thirds was thinking about the old management pair, Theories X and Y, and the search for a third way. The old X and Y was really just a simplistic bad worker/good worker theory, and led to much discussion of carrots versus sticks.

The past couple of decades have put an end to that debate, with pretty much every company coming down to a new carrot/stick synthesis: "We're all about carrots here, but if you don't achieve your carrot, we'll show you where to stick it."

So, instead of a third way, we really have had just one basic management notion - the traditional organization hierarchy. However, in a dazzling new book, "The Future of Management," Gary Hamel has offered us a vision of a second way for organizations to be structured. Indeed, he demonstrates that our role model already exists, saying, "Argue with me if you like, but I'm willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0."

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Web 2.0 is the jump from the Internet as a giant "Free - Take One" rack to a planet full of communities. The result is Wikipedia, YouTube, and the countless other ways to unleash creativity while aggregating knowledge. (And "countless" is literal here - by the time you managed to count anything on the Web, the number would change before you could count it. That's part of the adaptability that makes the Web so different from the old models of organizations - it's so, so . . . unorganized.)

Hamel's book is more philosophical than how-to, but there are plenty of suggestions for ways to experiment with Management 2.0. One is to let ideas compete, as they do in blogs. So during the past couple of weeks, I've made a suggestion to executives I've met with: Take some issue facing the company and create a blog around it. Let everyone opine about and debate the issue, and see what results.

You should have seen the reactions to that suggestion. It was like I suggested that they climb naked into a cement mixer, just to see what happened. Or, more accurately, as if I had suggested to a zookeeper that he let all the animals out of their cages, as an experiment.

I spoke with Hamel and related my experience. He laughed and said, "It's like guys asking for directions - management doesn't want to ask for advice." He speculated that the next generation of management might have to wait for the next generation: "We have kids growing up on the Web, believing that ideas should compete freely. Take a video on YouTube - no one asks if the person who put it up has a journalism degree from Columbia. It's useful or not, funny or not. We have dissociated ideas and credentials."

But in a world of credentials and organizational charts, how do you go about dissociating ideas? Hamel replied: "You've been in corporate meetings. You know how it goes, how if a senior vice president says something, people bow and scrape, but in the back of their minds they're wondering, 'Does that really make sense?' So you have ideas going out with very little peer review, and the next thing you know, you're taking a million dollar write-down."

Overcoming the old, structured thinking involves some risk-taking, or, as Hamel writes, "If you don't call the chairman 'dad,' you need to think twice before proposing any changes to management processes that impact pay."

But he goes on to offer a marvelous example from the retailer Best Buy. Hamel's training sparked a marketing guy who wanted to improve the company's forecasting and to invoke what's come to be known as "the wisdom of crowds." So he started a contest for employees to predict sales of the company's gift cards. Sure enough, while the marketing team's official forecast got within 5 percent, the average of the crowd was within one-half of a percent.

If the Web has "dissociated ideas and credentials," and Management 2.0 does the same, what will the result look like? Will it be chaos? Hey, is Wikipedia chaos or its opposite? Wikipedia is organized by reaching out beyond the old boundaries of organization. Said another way, disorganization is the new organization.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.