Skip to main content

Inverted Pyramid

The future of management as viewed by its practitioners across the industry is going to be very different from what we going on today. One commentator has succinctly summarized what ails organizations today :

A predominant feature of most organizations today is the top-down approach. Strategy is formulated at the top and is expected to be executed at lower levels of the pyramid. The underlying assumption is that wisdom, new ideas and a roadmap for the future are all the exclusive domain of the C-Suite.

Twenty years from now, I see the emergence of the inverted pyramid. Major decisions would be made at the operational level and driven up for ratification to the top. Such inclusiveness is inevitable given the ubiquitous nature of knowledge, the fact that radically new ideas can emanate from anywhere, and an adaptive roadmap is more likely to be generated by those who have a direct interface with key stakeholders - customers and suppliers. The assumption here is that with wealth being distributed more and more, the bottom of the present pyramid may have as much of a financial stake in the organization as the top.

All other constructs - the web structure, the CEO being the first among equals, empowerment, transparency, accountability et al follow from the inverted pyramid.

If the folks in the trenches or others like them are the consumers of the product or service in the organization's business domain, they can very well be the voice of customer that drives a lot of strategizing in the ivory towers. Yet, very rarely do they get to weigh in on usability, design, aesthetics, user experience, which competitors are doing a better job or what it would take to earn their loyalty and business.

When it comes to the implementation of strategy, without the input of the actual performers, management always risks over-promising and under-delivering. What is viewed a "minor implementation detail" in the grand scheme of things, can end up being the ugly, hydra-headed show-stopper.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more