Boundaryless Organizations

Traditional companies with boundaries, rules, and extensive plans are at a supreme disadvantage in today's globalized world, where technology changes daily and the value chain commands changes of its own. In a traditional company where people are categorized into neatly defined positions with their job descriptions filed in triplicate in the Human Resources department, the way a company plans its business can cause it to sink or swim bad planning can mean lost opportunities, being overtaken by the competition, loss of revenues, or watching its niche slip away because of a new technology, an alteration in the global marketplace, or simply a failure to market its product effectively. When changes occur, they happen too quickly for its organizational processes to meet them; as a result, opportunities are quickly lost, problem situations take over rapidly, and before the company can respond appropriately, it has lost customers, opportunities, and market share. Although that company likely has more than enough talent within its walls to offset all of those disasters, the talent is never put to use, because employees are constrained to operate within the confines of their job descriptions, where only the prescribed talents can be put to good use.

The answer to this dilemma lies in boundaryless organizations. The boundaryless organization does not operate according to tomes of planning documents, job descriptions, or tradition; instead, it regroups and

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ving so quickly that you can't anticipate it." In other words, forget about planning there is no way to plan adequately for the onslaught of changes that is coming down the pike. The only adequate response to such changes is to address them rapidly as they arise, applying your best resources to resolving them. Should all companies become boundaryless? Yes, but not all companies can do it today, because an organization has to be completely "on board" with such a radical methodology. Upper level management has to embrace it wholeheartedly, knowing that their status will essentially vanish in the new organization, and employees have to be retrained to understand how to operate under the new paradigm. Companies should already be in the process of getting to that point, however, and those that do it first will have the greatest advantage. Jack Welch talks about "cleaning out" bureaucracy in an organization. This is an idea that works. Bureaucracy is everything that holds back progress the old paradigm, the convoluted decision-making and agreement process, in short the red tape of traditional organizations. Getting rid of that enables an organization to regroup under a new paradigm that is more responsive and infinitely more ef

Category: Business - B