Working Thoughts

If the notion is correct and the United States turns into a
two tier work system, then after a certain threshold of growth is reached every
company would start to see diminishing returns. Unless the company implements a
form of Governance to loosely tie together the different departments.

But let’s back it up first. What happens now is the growth
of middle management. Companies hire managers to sort out the different
relationships. But what really happens is other managers need to be hired to
now sort those relationships out and the cycle continues. It is not to say that
a form of middle management isn’t needed, but it does mean that much of it can
be contained in the company that the services are purchased from.

What are needed are simple governance rules. These rules are
established and maintained by representatives from the different siloed groups.
The more detailed they become the more useless they are. The rules must be
simple and as few as possible. If the rules were created with clever forethought
then they will be restrictive to a point, but enabling as well.

Next is a review process. The newly created rules need some
sort of reality check. What I propose is to make them market based. Allow each
group to have some sort of denomination specifically set aside for rules. If a
rule is created that will severely hurt a particular group then that group can
use all of their allowance to move the rule in the market out of acceptance.
Most of the time this won’t happen, but it is a means for the individual groups
to have a veto power. One side benefit of this system is that it incents
partnerships. Partnerships in large organizations are welcomed because of the
sharing of ideas, resources, solutions, and risk. The company becomes much more
efficient this way. If two or more groups decide they like a rule then together
they can influence the internal rule market to put it into legislation.

Finally, there must be an exception practice to the accepted
rules.  Again, use the market system.
Provide each determined group a set of exception tokens. Every time they apply a
token they have one less to use. The groups will become very good at budgeting
their exceptions. But here is potentially another side effect – groups are motivated to negotiate exceptions. If one group doesn’t’t need them because of
good planning, then they can trade them with another group for more funds or
resources or whatever. The group that needs exceptions can continue to not be
in compliance and another group can benefit from it and continue to plan with
their newly garnered cache. The next year, the number of exception tokens is
reduced by a fair amount. This keeps every group striving towards compliance.

Please read Organizational Leadership – Empowering Your Experts to continue the theme.