Traditional companies with boundaries, rules, and extensive plans are at a supreme disadvantage in todayÆs 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 swimùbad 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 responds to changes as they occur, pulling in the best talent for each issue every time. The hierarchy of the organization vanishes, as the importance of information becomes key. When a change occurs in the marketplace that the organization must adapt to, the question is not ôWhoÆs in charge?ö but ôWho has the best information to help us address this?ö The people with the right information come together temporarily to solve this new problem, and then they disband to form new co...