Bertrand Duperrin blogged about The McKinsey Quarterly’s Innovative management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan. It’s an eye opener on how technology and globalization are creating an environment in which enterprises are motivated (or forced) to embrace innovation and individual creativity. These then become the way corporations compete and drive value, more so then process efficiency, repeatability or ability to minimize costs.

The authors define an operational model in which enterprises seek to monetize the intangible qualities of all of their employees (pure e2.0 dogma here, although the term is never mentioned) - making their employees more valuable by recognizing their ability contribute to operations in ways that don’t necessarily adhere to management orthodoxy. For example, Hamel and Bryan suggest that in this “post-managerial” society, strategy will no longer come from the top, but from the line employees closed to the push and pull of the market. Management takes on more of a parallel, off to the side role, making only decisions that must, by their nature, be made hierarchically.

The piece ends with Bryan noting that, because of these advances in technology and globalization companies will be able to harness ideas and innovation in a way that was not before possible. He calls it a “…an incredibly exciting time to be alive”. Indeed.

Radically-Enterprise 2.0, eh? An organization that exhibits both the technical underpinnings and the organizational DNA of what everyone’s talking about. I find their rationale compelling, but read the article if you’re in need of some more convincing. I’d challenge decision makers both in and outside of the corporate IT departments to spend a moment thinking about ways that today’s enterprise can deploy Enterprise 2.0 technology (and organizational design principals) in ways that exemplify Hamel and Bryan’s vision:

Lowell Bryan: “…the direction that most companies need to go in is improving how they enable their people to collaborate with one another at much lower cost by dramatically reducing unproductive search and coordination costs. And that means deploying such devices as talent marketplaces, knowledge marketplaces, and formal networks to make intangible assets flow throughout the company, as opposed to going up and down vertical chains of command.