The Organization of the Future

The organization of the future would be an entirely different place to work than the top-down, Worker versus Management organizations of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Work would no longer be an unending episode of “Survivor” fraught with political in-fighting, back-biting, personality conflicts and promotion by attrition as is the case in many organizations today.

In an organization of the future, everyone would be a stakeholder in the success of the organization as a whole and they would know it. Whenever the organization made a major gain, everyone’s pride in the accomplishment would be supplemented with a share in the results. Individual stellar performance would also be recognized and rewarded accordingly.

People would want to work there not so much because of the high pay or state of the art facilities and equipment, but because they believed in what the organization was doing and were proud to be associated with its products and services and thereby their ability to affect the lot of Mankind or at least improve his quality of life.

The organization of the future would be an open book for all stakeholders to read and know what the score was at any time. At anyone’s fingertips would be real-time metrics on the vital statistics of the organization – not just the financials but on every aspect of organizational efficiency, productivity, customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. And these would be graphically displayed for rapid assimilation and analysis. Each employee would know the structure of the organization cold and who is responsible for what. And there would be systems in place for anyone at any level of the organization to speak up, identify and affect change or improvement on anything that needed to be changed or improved. As such, rather than being looked upon as expenses or potential legal threats, each employee would be appreciated and respected as a profit center and change agent and there would be readily accessible and highly effective support systems for anyone in temporary difficulty. The stability and effectiveness of each employee would be valued above all else as it would be known that an organization is little more than a collection of individuals united for a common purpose, and that the true value of organizational output is in the applied talents of its people, without which the nice quarters, the pretty furnishings, the high-tech machinery and the fat paychecks all go away. Conversely, the organization of the future would have little tolerance for those who would dampen the spirits and performance of other team members.

The management team of an organization of the future would know what they were doing and would lead their respective areas of the organization with creative reasoning and contagious enthusiasm. Yet they would be highly approachable and would genuinely welcome and appreciate the viewpoints of anyone in their charge and would know them personally. They would know that no one knows the realities of a job better than the person who performs it every day. They would have methodologies for rapidly isolating the exact root cause of situations and the tactical expertise to get them instantly resolved. They would know that the only place to find real answers is out “on the shop floor.” They would know that leading an organization cannot be done from behind a desk that’s on an inaccessible floor behind an impenetrable wall of administrative assistants and protocol. There would be no ivory towers. And the members of the management team would be in as tight and continual coordination with each other as a team of commandos whose survival depended upon the skills and timely right actions of each other. There would be no “management silos.”

All would be able to avail themselves of training and continuing education so as to enhance their ability to contribute to the advancement of the organization. Thus career advancement and promotion would be based upon no other factor than one’s ability to get a job done as determined exclusively by objective measures.

The organization of the future would be a good corporate citizen. It would know that it was a resident of the local community, regardless of where its employees lived. It would take its responsibilities toward the local community and environment seriously by partnering with community groups and local schools and colleges. It would look to the local community as a recruitment pool and provide on-site apprenticeships for local business students in tight coordination with local business colleges. It would participate in their alumni out-reach projects and generously support their fund-raising activities. It would recognize that a good local business college is one of its major assets. It would know that its future success and prosperity was entirely dependent upon the quality of the education, training and leadership skills of the future stakeholders it hires and would act accordingly.

The methodologies of the organization of the future exist today. They need only be learned and applied.