Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century

Front Cover
Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, Michael S. Scott Morton
MIT Press, 2003 - Business & Economics - 433 pages

Technological changes have displaced the hierarchical corporation as the model for business organization; the large corporations of the new century are decentralizing and externalizing, creating networks of "industry ecosystems" that will replace the top-down organizations of the last century. Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century reports on a five-year multidisciplinary research initiative conducted by MIT's Sloan School of Management and sponsored by leading international corporations. The goal of the initiative was not only to understand the way we work now but to invent new ways of working and put them into practice.The twenty articles in the book are organized to answer three questions. The first part, "What is changing?" examines the reasons for change and the results of change. The second part, "What can you do about it?" considers the new business strategies and organizations that technology and competition demand. The third part, "What do you want in the first place?" examines the goals that animate the initiative, which go beyond pure profit to reflect the human values we want the organizations of the twenty-first century to serve.

 

Contents

Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century
3
The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited
25
Is Empowerment Just a Fad? Control Decision Making and IT
49
Information Technology Organizational
71
The Dawn of the ELance Economy
103
Digitalization of the 21st
133
Adaptive Management for a Changing World
173
ClockspeedBased Strategies for Supply Chain Design
205
The Case
265
The Comparative Advantage of XTeams
283
Eight Imperatives for the New IT Organization
297
What Do We Really Want? A Manifesto for Organizations
325
The Employment
353
Considering Your Employees
375
Innovating Our Way to the Next Industrial Revolution
389
Prospects for the New Century
415

Toward a Handbook
221
Excerpts
251

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