Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 65

New technologies continue to revolutionize the amount of information available and the speed at which it travels. Information that was once accessible exclusively to top‐level or middle managers is now easy to get and widely shared. New media have made communication immediate and far‐reaching. With the press of a key, anyone can reach another person—or an entire network. All this makes it easier to move decisions closer to the action.

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, U.S. and British forces had an obvious advantage in military hardware. They also had a powerful structural advantage because their superior information technology let them deploy a much more flexible and decentralized command structure. Commanders in the field could change their plans immediately in response to new developments. Iraqi forces, meanwhile, had a much slower, more vertical structure that relied on decisions from the top. A major reason that Iraqi resistance was lighter than expected in the early weeks was that commanders had no idea what to do when they were cut off from their chain of command (Broder and Schmitt, 2003).

Later, however, the structure and technology so effective against Iraq's military had more difficulty with an emerging resistance movement that evolved into a loosely connected structure of entrepreneurial local units that could adapt quickly to U.S. tactics. New technologies like the Internet and cell phones enabled the resistance to structure itself as a network of loosely connected units, each pursuing its own agenda in response to local conditions. The absence of strong central control in such networks can be a virtue because local units can adapt quickly to new developments and the loss of any one outpost does little damage to the whole.