lace needs to understand that marketplace fully. Business does not operate today as it did in the past, with companies gaining an easy monopoly in their industry by simply providing the best product or the lowest price. In our newly globalized economy, companies no longer compete with the business down the street, or even the ones in major U.S. cities. The globalized marketplace includes all companies everywhere around the world, because anyone anywhere can compete now with anyone anywhere else. Companies that have spent decades building a brand identity and achieving the number 1 spot in their industry can be dropped to second place tomorrow by some newcomer in a little-known area of the world. Furthermore, technology is changing so rapidly that todayÆs paradigms are tomorrowÆs obsolete technologies. In addition, business opportunities that arise in todayÆs environment no longer come with a nice cushion of time for making decisions and organizational adjustments for handling them; organizations must handle them immediately or lose ground. The new challenge for organizations in the global marketplace is the management of uncertainty.
This new environment has a substantial impact on the way organizations do business. In the centralized type of organization favored by many, the advantages are a central locus of control, where the ôbossö knows what everyone is working on and essentially controls the management of resources. The company is standardized throughout, so the way it works in one department is the way it works in every department, and the entire organization operates on an established set of rules and procedures that everyone is familiar with. With everyone operating according to the same paradigm, the organization is efficient. In the decentralized organization, on the other hand, there is no locus of control. Individual work groups or departments manage their own work, and they operate according to the deman...