Page 174 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 1 from the Silicon Valley, California 161

amateurs have freedom—to experiment and openly explore a wide array
of fringe options.
This rebellion for amateur freedom is facilitated by communications
technologies that enable people to participate increasingly on their own
terms. Such technological progress may aid the eventual arrival of an “indi-
vidualized corporation” (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1999). Such organizational
visions echo notions of democracy—a governance system that is premised
on the conviction that each person is the best judge of that person’s needs
(and desires to contribute) and that this judgment should be protected from
manipulation (March & Olsen, 1995).
This liberating shift may well give companies what is necessary to
unleash their human talent and raise the level of innovation needed to
compete with cheap (yet increasingly skilled) labor in emerging economies
such as China and India. To accomplish this feat, however, there are many
challenges managers will need to embrace to unleash innovation. To start,
managers must respect their employees’ independence—the very source of
innovation. The case for innovation is the case for the labor of love—that
is, the work of amateurs.

BUT HOW?

Here are two concrete examples of amateur organization. At a leading
nationwide retailer (the story told in greater length in Chapter 9), a group
of people formed an initiative to create a marketplace of ideas and talent.
The idea was deceptively simple: Anyone could pitch a project and invite
others to join it. The hypothesis was that such an avenue for ideas and com-
mitment would increase productivity and address an endemic scarcity of
resources. (“No, we don’t have anyone with free time at the moment to
assign to the project.”) The experiment’s successes confirmed that many
people will indeed welcome an avenue for amateuring. Even more impor-
tantly, the marketplace for ideas and talent might provide a strategy for a
much smoother resource allocation than the current corporate HR processes
offered. Rather than a manager’s allocating staff to projects, employees con-
tributed to projects they judged most compelling. For a company that