Page 27 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

to solve a multivariate optimization problem with no clear solution.
Companies that don’t get it right are gone before breakfast.
Managers and employees alike share the same issue at the indi-
vidual level. They no longer deliver a completed to-do list to a single
superior. Rather, multiple supervisors and customers compete for
their time and attention. They are given a greater workload than any
one person can complete, and they often get unclear and/or highly
variable direction as to what is most important. To be successful, they
must interact with a variety of other people; frequently they must also
mobilize staff and resources not under their direct control.
Those in management or leadership at any level face additional
problems. They are the pivot points in the information economy, and
they are barraged with requests for information and data from all
sides. In the meantime, they must learn not only to thrive within this
complex new world themselves, but to enable others to thrive within
it as well.
What’s happened? Whether or not we’ve changed, our positions
have. We are now in the early information age. Thanks to the ready
availability of an infi nite amount of information, and the new mar-
ket requirement that all of it be used intelligently in our business
decisions, the picture looks a lot more like the complex structure in
Figure 1.2 than the straightforward model from Figure 1.1.
Leaders expect every piece of information generated in any part of
the organization to be used in other parts. Each worker has changed
from a point in a process to a node in a network, sitting at the inter-

Quick Video: Burn Your Org Chart

Visit www.MakeWorkGreat.com for a short video segment about how
the onset of the information age has changed the structure of the
workplace. This is also an easy bit of information to share if you’re
trying to describe the contents of this chapter to a trusted friend or
colleague.

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