Designing the Networked Organization

Preface

The network is the organization of the future, and it may have been the organization of the past: think small-town communities. But global communities are now feasible. We are a family company: 3 employees represented in 30 countries via 300 colleagues. That’s what’s new, and that’s what this book is about.

We started a network because of limited financial resources—it’s expensive to open offices in 30 countries. But once started down this track, we encountered benefits we never imagined:

• Resilience. This is the ability of the business to weather downturns in the business cycle, whether caused by financial crises, terrorism, tsunamis, or viruses.
• Innovation. Nominated by some as the distinctive requirement of the modern organization, ...