An Agile Organization is an Hyperlinked Organization
When I got to chapter 5 (The Hyperlinked Organization) of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, I was amazed to see how many parallels there are between what the author David Weinberger talks about and Agile Organizations.
Traditional organizations (i.e. old-style management) use a Top-Down approach to communicate the strategy and transmit the orders. Employees are expected to execute on the orders and each level of the hierarchy is responsible to monitor the level below and take actions to correct any deviance from the plan. By comparison, any organization that operates like the web – via links and without hierarchy – greatly improves communication and performance.
The growth of the internet has been qualified as the largest and most complex human developed system. Organizational structures are no where near as complex. So why is it so difficult to break away from the command-and-control structure still used on most organizations?
