Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 87

Mintzberg's five‐sector imagery adds a new dimension to the conventional line‐staff organization chart but retains some of the traditional image of structure as a top‐down pyramid. Helgesen argues that the idea of hierarchy is primarily a male‐driven depiction, quite different from structures created by female executives:

The women I studied had built profoundly integrated and organic organizations in which the focus was on nurturing good relationships; in which the niceties of hierarchical rank and distinction played little part; and in which lines of communication were multiplicitous, open, and diffuse. I noted that women tended to put themselves at the center of their organizations rather than at the top, thus emphasizing both accessibility and equality, and that they labored constantly to include people in their decision‐making. (Helgesen, 1995, p. 10)

Helgesen coined the expression “web of inclusion” to depict an organic form more circular than hierarchical. The web builds from the center out. Its architect works much like a spider, spinning new threads of connection and reinforcing existing strands. The web's center and periphery are interconnected; action in one place ripples across the entire configuration, forming “an interconnected cosmic web in which the threads of all forces and events form an inseparable net of endlessly, mutually conditioned relations” (Fritjof Capra, quoted in Helgesen, 1995, p. 16). Consequently, weaknesses in either the center or the periphery of the web undermine the strength of the natural network.

A famous example of web organization is “Linux, Inc.,” the loose organization of individuals and organizations that has formed around Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open‐source operating system Linux, whose many variants power most of the world's supercomputers, cell phones, stock markets, and web domains. “Linux, Inc.” is anything but a traditional company:

There's no headquarters, no CEO, and no annual report. It's not a single company, but a cooperative venture. More than 13,000 developers from more than 1,300 companies along with thousands of individual volunteers have contributed to the Linux code. The Linux community, Torvalds says, is like a huge spider web, or better yet, multiple spider webs representing dozens of related open‐source projects. His office is “near where those webs intersect.” (Hamm, 2005)

Freewheeling web or lattice structures may encounter increasing challenges as an organization gets bigger. When Meg Whitman became CEO of Internet phenomenon eBay in 1998, she joined an organization of fewer than fifty employees configured in an informal web around founder Pierre Omidyar. When she tried to set up appointments with her new staff, she was surprised to learn that scheduled meetings were a foreign concept in a company where no one kept a calendar. Omidyar had built a company with a strong culture and powerful sense of community but no explicit strategy, no regular meetings, no marketing department, and almost no other identifiable structural elements. Despite the company's phenomenal growth and profitability, Whitman concluded that it was in danger of imploding without more structure and discipline. Omidyar agreed. He had worked hard to recruit Whitman because he believed she brought the big‐company management experience that eBay needed to keep growing (Hill and Farkas, 2000).