Mechanisms for avoiding customer service

The very requirement for customer service is a transaction cost- it is a by-product of a need or wish to transact. This means that customer service is derivative rather than fundamental. However, customers are increasingly automating the purchase of routine necessities and viewing shopping as a voluntary pleasurable leisure time activity. As such, customers expect friendly and responsive customer service.

When a customer wishes to transact, they should be making a positive voluntary choice- because they want to make that purchase from that place. There are many ways in which the requirement for and dependency on customer service- either at the time of purchase or the point of failure- can be avoided completely.

Prevention is better than correction: it is better to avoid suboptimal situations altogether than optimize them. For example, no queues at all is preferable to customer service attendants handing out drinks and entertaining waiting customers. Still, if that wait is unavoidable and prevention not possible, then optimization is better than nothing. If a problem bothers a customer and this problem recurs- such as insufficient customer order forms or pens to fill them in with- then it is not sufficient that when the customer asks for more pens they are passed across with a friendly smile and apology. Repeat offenders are never truly sorry, if they were, they would not keep re-offending.

The need for customer service can be minimized using the following mechanisms:

Par down and focus on essentials

Minimize the number of purchases you make- this minimizes the need for initial or subsequent interactions with customer service staff. The need for customer service is necessitated by possessions. To avoid requiring customer service, we should avoid the accumulation of non-essential possessions for the sake of conspicuous consumption and status signaling. (See Unorganization: The Lifestyle Handbook on unorgan.com for more information on what and what not to spend you money on).

Choose simple, high quality products and use professional services

When you have located a purchase that you consider to be necessary as well as nice, you should avoid unreliable equipment and inconsistent quality. Sourcing through lower priced but less reliable suppliers can be expensive "false economy" by requiring customer service and repairs, needing replacing sooner, causing non-productive time and so on.

The products and services themselves should be as simple to use as possible. This reduces the requirement to refer to and rely upon other people to work out how to use something. For example, a 50-page instruction manual should not be needed on how to use a particular mobile phone.

Brands (product or service identities such as trademarks) comprise an inner core and an outer core. The inner core is the product itself and the outer core is the branding and marketing of the inner core. Customer service is part of the outer core- you need a lot more of it if the inner core is of lower quality and vice versa. Consumers should be wary of purchasing products on the basis of glossy brochures and sales people's pitches alone. They should see the products working, try them out, ask existing owners, review independent research and so on.

It is also important that sales people do not make false promises to potential purchasers- these only create false expectations and lead to customer disappointment. It is far better to under-promise and over-deliver.

Things do break down because we do not unfortunately live in a perfectly unorganized world. Built-in obsolescence does exist and not every company has seven sigma quality accreditation.

Modes of customer service

When customer service has been avoided, its occurrence is either out of a positive choice or because it was unavoidable.

Customer service arises in different places in different ways:

Local face-to-face customer service such as when customers visit a physical shop (Customer remote physical, supplier home physical)

Friendly and personal customer service should be given in this scenario because the customer has made the effort to locate and visit the supplier's premises.

The premises should be well stocked and adequately staffed. This maximizes the likelihood that customers will leave the premises having been successfully and satisfactorily served from both a product and person point of view. In other words, the customer should have got the product they were looking for and been served it in a responsive, reliable and respectful manner.

Remote but human-to-human customer service such as when you telephone a supplier (Customer home physical, supplier remote physical)

This can be a frustrating and inefficient form of communication. It is difficult to get past the voice mail systems, get hold of the person that has the answers, get the answers from the person who has the answers and so on.

When a customer rings in, both sales and service inquiries involve some sort of call center taking the calls, logging them and filtering those inquiries which can be dealt with there and then from those which need to be escalated for further investigation. Call identity and routing allows the same people to take different types of calls.

First-time customers should ideally have to make no more than one menu choice before being connected to a live human operator. Regular users of electronic systems such as telephone banking should always have the option of connecting to a live operator at any stage of their call.

Supplier visits the customer's residence (Customer home physical, supplier remote physical)

These days, technology is making the provision of customer service in the customer's home easier to carry out, and therefore less costly. The supplier may need to go out to where the product or appliance is being used in order to service it, repair it, install it or whatever. The supplier's sales and service vehicles should be fitted with a location device (such as a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver). These vehicles regularly send in location information about where they are currently located over a mobile data network to a sales and service center. Whenever a new position update comes in, the position of a little icon depicting that vehicle changes on electronic mapping software running at the host. Visually, the company has an overview of its entire fleet and can use this information to dispatch the closest available suitable personnel to a sales or service inquiry. This not only increases customer responsiveness, but also saves money by retaining customers and deploying resources more effectively.

Electronic forms rather than paper should be used to log, assign and complete fault reports. Of course, it is necessary but not sufficient to use such technology- all employees must also care about what they are doing and what level of service they are giving.

Person to computer customer service such as when you use electronic commerce and order, for instance, a book from Amazon.com (Customer home electronic, supplier home electronic).

In such cases, the customer does not actually speak to or otherwise communicate with any staff at the electronic commerce vendor. As such, it is always reassuring if the supplier acknowledges receipt of the order and keeps the customer informed at key stages in the customer service process. The customer then has information about the status of their order and progress with it. It is also reassuring to be given a customer reference number- something to confirm that the complaint or sale has been logged and is being processed. This assists both the organization and the customer in completing the transaction effectively.

It does not matter how "busy" you are- being responsive and acknowledging the receipt of communication from a customer should be your premier priority. If you cannot respond in full immediately, let the person know. There is nothing as rude and frustrating as not knowing whether communications have been received and more important acted upon. Automatic email responders that send out a brief message acknowledging receipt are a useful first step that is better than no response at all- but a personal tailored response is better.

opporTUNEitizing

Delivering excellent customer service is everyone's job- but rigid organizational structures tend to allocate specific responsibility for particular types of customer service requests to particular people in particular departments. This rigid allocation process increases the dependence on those particular people being available for the customer to be served excellently.

Removing static structures facilitates the communication necessary to know the situation and serve customers promptly and accurately. The elimination of job titles and functional responsibilities removes the territorial attitude that a particular customer or area is not my responsibility or concern. Employees should be knowledgeable, competent, empowered and able to make decisions and act upon them.

The unorganization theory advocates two main ways of removing static structures from organizations to align them more closely to today's global and competitive unorganized world. These techniques are called opporTUNEitizing and downstructuring. Whereas downstructuring is the practice of eliminating organizational structure, opporTUNEitizing is the practice of making such structures dynamic.

Knowledge workers spend the majority of their time and effort developing new product and service ideas to satisfy customers. For such knowledge work, downstructuring techniques such as eliminating job descriptions, teleworking, reducing systems and procedures are useful. Because idea creation is not related to time or place, downstructuring is a useful tool that facilitates location independent working.

Downstructuring is less applicable for time and mission critical tasks such as customer service. However, it is also necessary in physical industries to free employees to take responsibility for product quality and customer service and continuously improve systems and processes. This is where opporTUNEitizing comes in.

Excellent customer service starts with flexible and dynamic internal processes. opporTUNEitizing delivers this by allowing employees to meet their end objectives of personal learning and customer responsiveness by minimizing the means (static systems, procedures, structures) that hinder the achievement of such objectives. Too many procedures were set up merely with the intention of arbitrary control of "subordinates". These can no longer be carried out in the competitive unorganized world and are the first to be eliminated. The remaining facilitatory procedures should then be opporTUNEitized, such that they are followed during routine activity, but can be transcended when circumstances deviate from routine. This is opporTUNEitizing- having procedures that are followed in routine cases but also empowering individuals to use their initiative both to improve routine procedures and also to bypass any procedures to meet non-routine customer requests.

"opporTUNEitizing" is the technique that empowers more than one person to make accurate decisions and provide adequate customer service. Customer service staff spend the majority of their time carrying out routine tasks by following set practices. They need to create when they are solving non-routine customer requests and requirements. As such, because it combines optimal completion of routine tasks with optimal completion of non-routine tasks, opporTUNEitizing is the predominant tool used for delivering excellent customer service.

opporTUNEitizing techniques include cross-training so that an employee has a core skill and focus but can and does work on other tasks related to the production and distribution process. They work in other areas according to personal interest and customer need. In this way, neither customers nor employees are dependent upon the willingness of another person to provide excellent customer service.

Tune your internal processes to be in the opportune place to take full advantage of opportunities to serve customers.

Customer Loyalty Schemes

A UK-based chain of grocery stores (Tesco) pioneered the introduction of a loyalty program through which customers were given money off vouchers in direct proportion to the amount they spent in that store. Its main competitor (Sainsburys) dismissed the loyalty scheme as trivial. Yet, millions of people signed up and that supermarket was soon introducing its own loyalty card. Some of the loyalty vouchers were good for money off specific products and others for money off any purchase. These custom vouchers were generated using computer analysis of purchase dynamics- data mining of all the stored records of a customer's purchases.

Many similar loyalty programs have now been up and running for a couple of years, yet I have still not joined any, despite the fact that I shop in Tesco nearly every day. This is because I consider this level of information about my eating habits an invasion of my privacy. I consider my life to be an open book and have nothing to hide, but I do not like strangers to have more detailed information about what I do than my family and myself have. This is knowledge about my specific micro-behavior- someone can tell what is in my kitchen cupboards and ascertain what I am eating. I am also embarrassed by how much junk food I consume and don't want it recorded anywhere!

There are some privacy laws that prevent disclosure by the supermarket of this information- but I do not trust a static paper-based law over the curiosity of an individual. I get an itemized bill from my telephone company- but they only know who I called and when- not what I talked about (hopefully). I also get detailed credit card and bank statements, but neither comprehensively or accurately represents my spending patterns. Because I use multiple suppliers, any one bill only represents a subset of my transactions. I may make a cash withdrawal, but what I spend it on is my own business. It is important for customers to have multiple sources for similar services since quite often, the customer service offered by one company will let them down. Being able to immediately switch to another supplier confers accountability on the suboptimal service deliverer, and convenience for the customer who is not damaged by the inflexibility and unresponsiveness of the supplier.

As a consumer, I avoid loyalty programs because of the privacy issue and because everyone has a different loyalty card, necessitating carrying lots of cards around, and because the rewards don't often justify the bother. One point for every ten dollars spent is not exactly the financial jackpot! I can see why customer loyalty programs are useful tools for retailers and other companies. As with knowledge management programs, having a central store of data on customers can provide a lot of information and intelligence about customer behavior.

I like simple customer loyalty programs such as a cafe I visited in Norway that gave out a paper business card on the back of which is a place to put a stamp denoting how many coffees a customer has bought. Once five stamps have been collected, the sixth coffee is free! Simple, easy, valuable. The information is not electronically stored, is controlled by the customer and helps the company gets its name and address into the customer's wallet.

Customer loyalty is important- but finding the right means to retain it is even more crucial.

I am an advocate of having customer service charters. In the early 1990s in Britain, the Conservative Party that was then in government introduced a citizen's charter that committed public bodies to meeting certain performance targets. Such charters are a positive step that let customers know firstly the minimum performance standards that organization is targeting and secondly the compensation paid to customers when those customer service standards are not met. The level of service you will provide customers should be clearly and explicitly stated and employees empowered to meet those charter commitments.

When performance targets are specified within customer service charters, customers are rewarded with compensation and the supplier is stung financially if their service falls below those performance targets. Poor performance should be penalized: this is an explicit commitment to customers: it categorically states in writing the performance standards that the company is looking to achieve. Such charters also provide customers with an established complaints procedure through which they can air their complaints.

Customer service charters confer both incentives and independence on employees to allow them to dedicate their time and energy to serving customers. When such a charter exists, an employee going outside of routine procedures to meet or exceed customer service standards can use the charter to justify the necessity of that action to others in the organization. This confers independence. The charter also incentivizes responsive customer service- or at least disincentivizes a lack of responsiveness through penalty.

Examples of customer service charters include compensation if your order is not fulfilled or responded to within a certain timeframe and twice the difference back if it doesn't prove to be cheaper switching to a competing service. These commitments should be clear and specific. Other less explicit service commitments from, for example, grocery stores to open up more checkouts when queues exceed a certain length are positive and welcome, but should optimally be specific.

It is important to set the right targets at the right levels- which is often very difficult to do given the limited understanding of managers. Measures always distort attention away from other important goals. The costs of achieving the set targets should also be considered.

A customer service charter can attempt to optimize customer responsiveness within current organizational forms. Customer service charters are useful ways of improving the mandate and rewards for customer service within existing organizations that suffer from politics, chains of command and so on. But it is very difficult for managers who suffer from bounded rationality to accurately and fairly reward employees for excellent customer service. The company directors are accountable for the company's performance but they do not provide the customer service themselves. In order to get the sort of performance they need, the directors stipulate that organizational procedures be implemented instead of focusing on the outcome rather than the process and opporTUNEitizing. The whole process is flawed, as is the very existence of non-owning employees and static organizations.

Given these facts, the ultimate accountability is conferred by viable choices within free markets. When effective competition is in place, customers can go elsewhere if the standards fall below their own personal expectations- that may be more or less challenging than the stipulated performance standards.

The ultimate stimulus for excellent customer service

I believe that the best way to incentivize people to learn, collaborate, create, achieve excellence and all of those other positive constructs associated with work, including serving customers excellently, is within market-based companies in which members voluntarily cooperate and collaborate to meet customer requirements. If its my customer, as opposed to my company's customer- if they are ringing me and not my company- then I am directly motivated and rewarded for responding with excellence.

In the same way as capitalism confers accountability on entrepreneurs, a lack of market forces and monetary incentives WITHIN organizations leads to non-motivation and lack of responsiveness. The people accountable for the company's performance are not those providing the customer service. In order to get the sort of performance they need, the directors stipulate that organizational procedures be implemented to coerce certain standards. The whole process is flawed, as is the very existence of non-owning employees and static organizations. Only in self-employed situations where people are responsible for their results and directly accountable for the service they provide for customers, can great initial service and customer service be expected. Only independence and ownership and accountability and reward for performance can deliver consistent customer excellence.

Under the transaction costs paradigm (Coase) economic activity can be carried out within markets or firms. Firms as we know them today- office based, permanent staff, integrated arose because the transaction costs from organizing using the market were higher than those from using the firm for the same amount of production. But now enabling technologies are reducing transaction costs and thereby facilitating collaboration within markets- partnering, outsourcing, teleworking and so on. We are persisting unnecessarily with our outmoded offices and organizations.

True incentives are found within dynamic, positive constructs such as markets. Some of this incentive is compelled by the need to bring in an income but most of it is motivated because direction and course are not being set by someone else or confined with static structures.

Truly and consistently great initial and ongoing customer service can only be expected when people are responsible for their results and directly accountable for the service they provide to their customers. Only independence and ownership and accountability and reward for performance can deliver consistent customer excellence.

As such, customer service standards have improved. Competition has spurred a much wider variety of choices for customers. This has incentivized companies to provide their customers with great services. But the standards of customer service are still inconsistent within and between different businesses. Organizations should look to create greater incentives and independence for their employees through opporTUNEitizing measures such as customer service charters that take priority over existing company procedures for non-routine customer service. And ultimately, the best way to realize consistently excellent customer service are entrepreneurs in free markets.

Conclusion

There is so much bad and average customer service out there that any company or person who genuinely goes out of their way to serve a customer excellently is a valuable asset. Customer service is still a competitive advantage that sets a company apart from its competitors. Serving the customer well is the absolute key to ongoing business success and enduring customer relationships.

Bibliography

Karr and Blohowiak, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Customer Service, Alpha Book, 1997.

This is a lucid, comprehensive guide to improving customer service in practice. It contains, for example, information about SMARTS: the requirement for customer service charters to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant to customers, Timely and Supported by the organization.

To order the book, click here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0028619536/unorganizationA/

Knowledge Management

There is much talk about the high importance of "knowledge management" and "intellectual capital" in the unorganized world in which we work with our heads and not with our hands. In the unorganized world, the only property that matters is intellectual property, the only matter that matters is brain matter.

Knowledge is relevant, useful information about things that are important to the organization such as its customers, competitors, product development processes and so on. Knowledge management is all about capturing and leveraging valuable information and making it widely available for use by other people throughout the organization. Knowledge management concerns itself with packaging up information into "components" which when combined and modified can be reused in other places and contexts by other people in the organization.

Positively, knowledge management techniques are lateral across the organization and therefore transcend current structures. This reduces the dependency of employees on their fellow department members. The knowledge is stored and accessible throughout the organization regardless of geography or operating unit. This is achieved using new technologies such as intranets and relational databases. Hence, someone in one area of the company can access information from other areas and past projects to help them make sense of and respond to current projects for different clients. Different employees can refine rather than reinvent knowledge and thereby respond more quickly to the current demands of customers.

In the pre-knowledge management era, most situation and job-specific information resided in the heads of people. Different people may have been carrying out the same sorts of tasks in other parts of the same organization. Yet, the two people may not have talked to one another, let alone shared knowledge about how best to get their similar jobs done. It is also quite clear that knowledge has in the past been difficult to access- because it resided either in brain cells in heads or on paper in locked up filing cabinets. Moreover, some senior managers deliberately protected their knowledge whereas the new imperative for leaders is to diffuse useful information throughout the organization.

The value of having a knowledge database within an existing organization depends upon the extent to which the knowledge and ideas available IN the company are more useful than those available outside the company. External knowledge sources include Internet-related media such as Internet sites and external communities of interest in the form of discussion forums and email lists.

It would be interesting to compare the value of the knowledge gained using the same sensitive search engine tool such as Alta Vista on the public Internet and on the private knowledge database. Perhaps the internally stored knowledge would be more specific to that company and its requirements- requiring less original thought from the employees to solve the problem. Information overload is a myth. Technology tools such as search engines and intelligent agents give everyone the ability to filter down and closely identify the exact type of answers they want.

Knowledge management is less useful when the sought after answers have not been generated in that organization at all. This is the case even in the impossible situation of having a knowledge database that is completely coherent and therefore containing all the valuable knowledge that resides within the organization. Employees must be certain to reassess the truth in the knowledge every time they reuse it- in a fast changing world, information captured in the past may no longer be relevant. For example, some management consultants and Internet commentators have made the mistake of extrapolating the increasing returns model to explain the content-driven era, when in fact it ceased being important in the distribution-driven era.

It is clearly useful to encourage information "externalities" where someone else benefits from being an employee of a particular company because they can access the proprietary knowledge of other people in their organization. Whether I would want to join a management consultancy in order to gain access to its confidential knowledge database is very mute indeed. Its value would depend on the unique truths in its knowledge. These insights and truths are not available from any other sources and are applicable to other situations.

I can well understand why organizations want to gain access to the knowledge in their employee’s heads. Employees can be rewarded for complying with such systems and contributing to the knowledge database. In fact, gathering the knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for successful knowledge management- that knowledge also has to be used and applied. Hence, rewarding employees for sharing and using knowledge is necessary to get people to use the system extensively. Once they have shared all their valuable information in the knowledge database, employees need to continue creating new knowledge.

Knowledge management is the search for an advantage of persisting with organizations as we know them based on formal membership. It is an attempt to turn an organization into something more than just a formal and uncomfortable collection of individuals working in the same company but not necessarily together or for the same ends.

It may well be useful to have a knowledge database so that when an employee leaves the company, the new recruit has access to the knowledge nuggets of wisdom left behind. Currently, successors have to rely primarily on just a set of quality manuals and procedures explaining what actions to take to do the job- not how or what to think. Knowledge management is to knowledge-based organizations what job procedures were in administration and manufacturing-based organizations.

It is very easy to imagine the implementation of knowledge management exercises as mandatory. Information "components" would then be passed up the hierarchy and signed off and agreed by managers before being posted to the knowledge database. Technology must be accompanied by attitude change- otherwise it just automates rather than informates. The knowledge sharing and collaboration should be voluntary and not mandatory. Compulsion is never the best way to achieve a valuable enduring end.

The fundamental flaws of organized business organizations of bounded rationality, dependence, transaction costs and force (See "Unorganization: The Individual Handbook") coupled with the fundamental change in the operating environment that is the global and diverse unorganized world mean that knowledge management is improvement within a suboptimal organizational form. It is evolutionary improvement in a fundamentally different world.

The optimal way to share knowledge and stimulate effective collaboration and creation to meet end customer requirements is within "collapsible corporations". In these dynamic organizational forms, people with complementary expertise voluntarily collaborate to share knowledge in order to solve a particular problem. Such voluntary free market based forms optimize the incentives to collaborate and widen the quantity and quality of knowledge that can be accessed.

In sum then, knowledge is essential but knowledge management not sufficient to ensure the survival of organizations as we know them. Development and deployment of knowledge is the reason for companies to exist in the unorganized world. This essential sharing of information and collaboration to develop new knowledge should preferably take place in voluntary contexts rather than because employees are compelled to contribute to knowledge databases.

The end of technophobia

As we saw in Section A, thanks to technologies, it is becoming a lot easier to coordinate economic activity using markets rather than firms. It is the existence of transaction costs when using free markets that provides the economic justification for the existence of firms. "The costs of using the market arise from the necessity to find out what the relevant prices are, and the costs of negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each transaction which takes place in a market". (COASE, 1937).

Technology is only a means to an end. Its ultimate impact depends on how it is being applied and used. Technologies are not the holy grail that will cure the world of all its ills. The technologies I discuss here do not prevent hunger or end poverty. But they will facilitate the pursuit by individuals of the many economic opportunities in the unorganized world that will earn them income, the most effective way of improving access to food, shelter and education. "Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world." (ARCHIMEDES). I believe that that lever is technology. What humanity can dream, technology can deliver.

People say to me that technologies are not going to make that much of a difference because there is widespread technophobia amongst people, i.e. a reluctance to use technologies because of their perceived complexity. The technologies may well exist but attitudes that are receptive to new technological developments do not.

Technologies become really persuasive when applications built using them do not require users to change their habits. Instead of individuals having to adapt their habits and behavior to overcome the limitations of the technologies, technologies are now portable, flexible and useable. Technologies have to work consistently otherwise the user has to figure out why the technology has stopped rather than thinking about what they want to use it for.

I genuinely think that technologies have now developed to the stage where they are so reliable and easy to use that they become transparent to the user. The structure of Internet is complicated but the mechanism through which email messages are actually sent and how data is transferred from servers is transparent and irrelevant to Internet users. The man machine interface for both the hardware and the software is getting to be so intuitive and easy to use that the user can learn by using with very little training. When Internet browsers are built into televisions, some people will still think they’re using teletext.

Take for instance, mobile phones. As we saw in the "Mobile Working" section, mobile phones are a great technology for keeping in touch whilst on the move. Three generations of mobile phones have emerged so far, each successive generation more reliable and flexible than the last:

Analogue: You could only easily use analogue cellular to make voice calls, and typically only in any one country.

Digital mobile phone systems added fax, data and messaging capabilities as well as voice telephone service in many countries.

Satellite services will supplement the digital offerings and coverage and offer new services such as position location and available to 98% of the world’s landmass.

With each new generation of technology, the services which can de deployed on them become more and more wide ranging and truly limited only by imagination. We are reaching that stage, with exciting implications for unorganizing companies.

Lets take a look at some of the more important new technologies that decrease transaction costs and what they can be used for.

Position Location- The People Pollers

Another technology that I believe will profoundly affect both individuals and institutions is position location satellite services. Position location applications will really take off with the launch the late 1990s of the satellite-based mobile telephone networks. These satellite networks will provide mobile telecommunications service in 98% of the world's landmass excluding only the poles (North and South rather than Poland!). The most powerful of the new position location services is that proposed for the Globalstar mobile satellite system whose 48 satellites will be launched from 1997 with commercial service beginning in early 1999. (See www.globalstar.com). Many regulatory, financial and technical challenges have already been overcome. Globalstar will let anyone with a position location terminal such as a mobile telephone find out their position. Additionally, the location of terminals can be remotely requested- letting someone in an office or house find out where someone else is. Not only can users find out where they are, but they can choose to tell other people their position too.

One service that uses the underlying position location technology is what I call "The People Pollers". This service lets polled people with mobile phones communicate requests for assistance to other people directly or via a central monitoring station. The monitoring station can either manually or automatically assign the nearest suitable rescue personnel to the polled person requesting assistance. Rapid response in order to save lives can be provided. Rescue personnel could be, for example, other family members, the police, fire or ambulance, doctors or nurses, students, graduates, soldiers or post office workers. All the telecommunication company would do is route the calls to the chosen personnel. The police person would then locate the polled person using position location services (moving towards them on the map).

Position location only terminals could be given to the police for controlled distribution to those in particular need of security, such as handicapped or threatened people. The People Pollers would act as a deterrent to personal crimes such as robbery, rape and abduction. It connects the individual to other people when necessary whilst allowing them to go about their own business autonomously in the normal course of events.

Position location services within mobile satellite systems are not however the only technology that offers great potential to shift the balance of power away from institutions towards all individuals.

Electronic agents

Electronic agents are another such technology and are defined as "mobile programs which go to places in the network to carry out their owners' instructions. They can be thought of as extensions of the people who dispatch them." (AT&T). Agents are "self-contained programs that roam communications networks delivering and receiving messages or looking for information or services." (FOREMSKI, 7/1/94).

Four main types of electronic agents can be identified:

Get Me Information Agents can, for example, autonomously search the Internet for relevant information.

Find And Buy agents can locate the least expensive purchase and organize payment and delivery of the purchase itself.

Alert Me When It Happens agents can be told to check departure times for delays and inform in the case that any arise.

Wait For Trigger Then Act agents can for example be told to purchase shares when stock prices fall to a certain level on a certain stock. (BLAKESEE, 1996).

Electronic agents can learn their master's preferences and interests and identify patterns from which tasks can start to be automated on their master's behalf.

Once issued with instructions, the agents are sent out with budgets which entitle them to use resources. When agents are created, a certain budget is allotted to allow the agent to perform its task. helps to ensure that the costs of using agents for completing tasks are in relation to the benefits and importance derived by the agent's master. (ECONOMIST, 14/05/94).

The owner of agents does not even need be involved in negotiating and organizing transactions. Agents can talk to other agents, allowing most buying and selling to be automated. The seller's agent will be able to identify those buyer's agents which are worth dealing with, remember their past preferences and make them special offers and send them tailored information. (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 27/09/94). "Software Agents could Solve Many of Life's Little Mysteries: Ever buy something, and then wonder if you'd bought the best one at the lowest price? Did you ever try to charge something on your credit card, only to find you'd reached your credit limit? How about going to the video store, only to find that the movie you want is out? Perfect information does not exist and probably never will, but it sure would be nice if many of life's little mysteries were solved before they made you feel embarrassed, frustrated, or just plain grumpy... The solution is an invention called an electronic agent- a smart little computer program that runs at your behest, watches out for your interests, and lets you know when something's happened or changed that might affect your life, or even if something happens that might just interest you." (DICKENSON).

Electronic agents are powerful because they will change the way commerce is conducted and people socialize. The implications of electronic agents go far beyond simply helping individuals to keep track of changes in the external environment which affect and interest them. This could happen even whilst the individual is still in a hierarchy. Agents will also affect how firms will be organized. For example, previously it has been merchandisers who have flooded the marketplace with advertising about their products. With electronic agents this can be reversed so that a seller's market becomes more of a buyer's market. The buyer's agent could for instance inform the seller that they are an interested buyer with certain requirements, giving the seller the opportunity to respond. Individuals can respond using their own agents, and could collaborate with their partners and put together a package that meets the buyer's exact requirement. (KLINE, 01/95).

Individuals simply tell their electronic agent what assistance is needed and it goes off and finds it from the appropriate source. First the agent will check the availability of others whom their masters have an affinity with, such as family members, friends and business partners. If these people are not available or not able to respond quickly, the agent routes the signal to a suitable alternative organization or individual. My agent has learned which are the competent private organizations by observing the company's agents and what their masters are telling them to do. Electronic agents belonging to people who have used the company in the past can be instantaneously queried: word of mouth remains the most effective form of advertising.

Electronic agents will empower individuals and thereby threaten the form and reason for existence of organizations as well. Marc Porat, former Chief Executive Officer of General Magic, a company that created some agent technology, describes the effect of agents on individuals and institutions. "The transaction cost of finding you, and arriving at some sort of exchange value is high... The invention of electronic agents will allow people to abstract their commercial desires from their physical selves- to create representatives of themselves- that go off and do useful things for them in the marketplace, buying and selling goods and services. We have always been firmly rooted in ourselves, except for minor exceptions like the ability to call a travel agent or a stockbroker and have that agent do things for us. Until now, only the rich could afford agents. But with digital technology, people will have the ability to create electronic agents for free, essentially- or close to free- to do things for them." (KLINE, 01/95). "There's never been a time in history where the ordinary customer can put out a request-for-proposal into the market at large and have vendors bid on it. Corporations can do it. Governments can do it. But not consumers." Now, with agent technologies, individuals can do what institutions do, facilitating collapsible corporations.

The Internet

The Internet is a technology with the potential for very positive affects on individuals. "The Internet is a worldwide telecommunications network linking several million computer systems and more than 30m users who exchange electronic mail and browse for information. It is self-regulating and under the control of no authority." (CANE, 15/06/95). [There are probably now closer to 100 million Internet users globally). The Internet lets individuals publish their work with little or no entry barriers. The Internet reduces the entry barriers to opportunities because access is even and success is based more on talent than membership. It is easy for any individual to have a global presence instantly using media such as the Internet. Any individual can cheaply set up an Internet site and people around the world can then cheaply access that information and contact the owner of the Internet site for more information using electronic mail. No one censors or edits or otherwise judges that content, and no-one can prevent its publication. Its success depends upon the perceived value of the content published there. Now I know why they spell the Internet with a capital "I". Given its impact, I think it deserves it.

An off-shoot of the Internet, the intranet, will provide a central information repository for individuals and companies to use to store and share their knowledge. An intranet is a World Wide Web home page set up using the same software as Internet pages, but with a so-called security "firewall" limiting access to authorized organizational members. Any organizational member anywhere can dial into the intranet site for the cost of a local telephone call using standard World Wide Web browser software such as Netscape Navigator. They can then view whatever is on their private Internet site, be it project plans, customer tenders, requests for project members and other internal company specific information. The company as electronic bulletin board perhaps.

Dynamic authoring

Intranet infrastructure can already be used to unorganize companies- today. Imagine two separate companies with different skill sets collaborating on a project. Partner company or person A can collaborate with Partner B using standard Internet technology, namely Internet browsers locally and so-called dynamic authoring at the host offices. When the server gets a request for information from a Internet browser it extracts this information from the business database and sends it to the requester. This process is known as Internet dynamic authoring, a powerful facilitating process for collaboration between Company A and Company B. Dynamic authoring basically means that business database records which are not stored directly on the Internet can nonetheless be sent in real time into a tailor-made Internet page. The Internet is the common means through which both companies can access and display information.

This collaboration can take place irrespective of any lack of compatibility between the PC platforms they are running their browsers on. Company A could have an Apple Macintosh environment and Company B a Windows PC platform. Despite this, information can be exchanged across the Internet anyway. Neither does it matter what type of platform the business database is running on. Dynamic authoring translates information from one environment into the shareable Internet format.

Dynamic authoring also overcomes the need to manually update Internet pages as information changes. Instead, tailored data can be published as and when it is requested, and is always up-to-date with the business service data. For example, parcel tracking Internet sites dynamically author the current position of packages by taking data from the parcel company’s database systems and posting it into Internet format on the parcel inquirer’s Internet browser. The information available to the parcel inquirer can be restricted to the status of their package only. The parcel company’s "extranet" relationships with other suppliers, for example, airlines, are "firewalled" off (Security is provided to protect private data from public access). An extranet is an intranet which suppliers, strategic partners and other collaborators have access to.

The power of the Internet is that individuals, separate organizations or separate departments or branch offices can be connected through it. The Internet provides an inexpensive global information delivery mechanism and means by which electronic transactions can take place through computer networks. Transient relationships are possible because expensive dedicated leased lines for electronic data exchange are not needed. Instead, individuals just need an inexpensive Internet service provider account, which can be dialed up from a fixed telephone or mobile network modem. With dynamic authoring, any information can be shared from any database, providing people have sufficient access rights. Controlled relationships are facilitated because firewall security restricts access to those data sets Company B wants Company A to have access to. The firewall acts as an information filter.

Electronic banking

To illustrate the profound implications of Internet technologies such as Internet browsers and dynamic authoring, I will describe how they will transform the banking industry. Most people currently use a high street bank, in other words, they visit a geographically located physical branch to transact. Personally, I really dislike this physical branch model and having to be physically present to transact at a counter or Automatic Teller Machine (ATM). It is energy consuming getting from work or home down to the branch, and time consuming getting to the branch and queuing for counter service. Ideally, customers could transact and withdraw cash remotely from wherever they are. This is both more convenient for customers and cheaper per transaction for banks. Physical branch banks in the UK bleed between 55% and 70% of their income as costs, telephone banks around 25%, on-line banks under 20%. (HOLLINGER AND GRAHAM, 26/10/96).

As I envisage it, this conventional banking model will be replaced by my model of electronic banking, called the Internet browser model. This new model involves the banks using Internet dynamic authoring of information from any of their host business databases. At the same time, the bank’s customers use Internet browsers running on any device to access "virtual branches" for banking services such as transferring funds and arranging loans. Internet browsers will soon be integrated into every device, from smart mobile phones to network computers (NCs). Internet browsers will be the universal client (i.e. information access mechanism) and will be ubiquitous such that there will not be "information haves" and "information have-nots". Instead, everyone will have access to a Internet browser from some consumer device such as a TV, telephone or PC. NCs are stripped down PCs with software applications such as spreadsheets stored not on the local device but on the Internet itself.

As ever, dynamic authoring will be critical in developing true electronic banking. A customer would enter the bank’s Internet address (such as www.bankZ.com) into their Internet browser, which dials up the bank’s Internet Server. The requested information is located in the bank’s business service databases and dynamically authored into an Internet template for transmission back to the originating Internet browser. None of this information need go through a one off process of transferring all the data into Internet format. Customers can transact using this basic model of client Internet browser and host dynamic authoring.

For example, when shopping, funds can be transferred in real time from the purchaser’s to the seller’s bank accounts using Internet browsers. Electronic tills will have integrated Internet browsers, as will ATMs. Smart mobile phones will become electronic purses. Dynamic authoring means that buyers and sellers can use different banks and legacy database systems and different Internet browser enabled devices. The banks just need access through each other’s firewalls to "clear" funds periodically. And the technology is available now, the applications just need to be implemented.

And it is not just the banks which will be transformed by ubiquitous Internet browsers and powerful dynamic authoring. Its just information after all, and all the Internet is is an information delivery mechanism. I wrote about this topic in a letter published in the Financial Times called "Web requires professional surfers":

If in "Rise of the Internet threatens traditional banks’ market", (FT, AUGUST 12th 1996), you replace the word "banks" with "companies" and the word "branch" with "office", you end up with an emerging truth. That is, all companies in all sectors are significantly affected by applications of technologies such as the Internet.

Web-based order processing, that is, Internet front ends to traditional legacy database systems, are the next big trend which many banks and other retailers will adopt as they move past entry level Internet presence.

Technologies such as credit [secure] credit card authorisation, Java and ActiveX will facilitate interactive Web pages, increasing the attractiveness of online transactions.

If you combine the impact of the Internet with other technologies such as smart mobile phones and position location systems you begin to see the possibility of "collapsible corporations" defined by transient transaction-oriented electronic signals and not physical, geographical structures such as branches.

Traditional vested interests may deny this but as the growth in the graph in your article shows, these trends are irresistible. The repercussions in terms of "technological capitalism", in which individuals can participate in, and benefit from, free markets, are phenomenal.

Entry barriers to the Internet are low and publishing and retailing opportunities high. The waves that the Web will throw up will require pro-surfers." (BUCKINGHAM, 21/08/96).

Implications for organizations

Technologies such as the Internet will have profound implications for the way that work and companies are organized. They are a fundamental facilitator of unorganizing companies because you no longer need a high cost fixed overhead administrative office infrastructure. Think of the massive savings in fixed overheads if your head office is an Internet site. When you are using the Internet you don’t even need to have a Internet or e-mail Server at your offices.

Currently, organizational processes are based around physical piles of paper-based documents. There is so much paper in offices: filling cabinets, in trays full of "snail mail" post, management reports, invoices, forms etc. It has got to the stage where it quicker to dial directory inquiries than locate a business card to get a telephone number. Information is out of date before we have time to file in (which has the advantage that we can simply put it in the recycling bin!).

We need to apply information technology in organizations for several reasons:

To process the increased amount of information available in order to understand events in the unorganized world and identify global market opportunities. This means that information cannot be segregated on the basis of rules to restrict volume, timeliness, breadth and usefulness of information as it is in hierarchies. The availability of data must no longer be restricted to conversations, filling cabinets, and manager’s heads. It can be shared throughout the corporation.

To prevent information from being distorted and delayed. Employees can go directly to the source of information by calling it up using an Internet browser. Effectively you make the access to information more transparent, thereby removing the low level barriers to high level thinking.

To allow information to be accessed and processed in parallel rather than sequentially by making information available to relevant Business Partners, suppliers and employees.

To provide employees with the information they need to make decisions, for example, the ability to access a Business Partner’s home pages to see if they have a suitable capability to deliver a customer solution.

Most companies still have paper-based sales order processes which involve many different people who are often geographically dispersed. Pieces of paper can travel many miles during processing. Such paper-based processes can be replaced by electronic ones. It is already possible for electronic forms to be called up through an Internet browser and completed and sent across the Internet, processed (automatically by electronic agents) and passed on through intranets and extranets to other companies such as banks. This dramatically speeds up the processing time and thus the responsiveness. It also reduces the number of data entry errors by replacing handwritten forms with electronic forms that have drop down menus from which options can be clicked on. The browser becomes the key to the electronic filling cabinet with incoming and outgoing mail automatically sorted and stored in that company’s electronic file along with hypertext links to that company’s home Internet pages.

This will clearly automate the data preparation and entry jobs, with resulting loss of administrative jobs. However, it is vitally important to remember that "information technology is characterized by a fundamental duality that has not yet been fully appreciated. On the one hand, the technology can be applied to automating operations according to a logic that hardly differs from that of the nineteenth-century machine system- replace the human body with a technology that enables the same processes to be performed with more continuity and control. On the other, the same technology simultaneously generates information about the underlying productive and administrative processes through which an organization accomplishes its work... In this way information technology supersedes the traditional logic of automation... Activities, events, and objects are translated into and made visible by information when a technology informates as well as automates." (ZUBOFF, 1988). For example, supermarket scanners automate the grocery checkout process and simultaneously generate information that can be used for market research and stock re-ordering. Technology does far more than just routinize and eliminate jobs, it increases the intellectual work for all employees and the value they can add through the ideas they generate when interpreting this data. Technology frees employees from mundane routine, letting them do the fun stuff like create and innovate.

The informating process means that we are going to need "knowledge workers" who make sense of the patterns of data, thereby adding value to it. "Our definition of a knowledge worker is someone who sits behind a desk and plans to take information and crunch it with ideas". (LEVY, 1995). This is a great definition except the desk does not have to be in an office. The very nature of work has changed from working with our hands to working with our heads. We need to aware that as ever people inevitably can only process this data in incomplete ways and that more data is not necessarily better data. Just as we need to have visited and explored places to really understand them, we still require some actual human contacts and physical visits to better understand business processes and objectives.

Let me now describe a company that has already downstructured. Channel Africa, part of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), radically downstructured to adjust to the post-apartheid unorganized world.

Since the early 1990s, South Africa has been undergoing a fundamental transition from the restricted, old, organized apartheid world to a new, largely unorganized society with freedom of movement and universal elections. As was to be expected, this revolution has permanently affected all individuals, companies, institutions and politicians in South Africa. In response, the country’s monopoly broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), engaged in radical downsizing, including the compulsory sale of many local radio stations and liberalization in particular of local commercial radio. These efforts further stimulated the establishment of numerous private and independent community radio stations throughout South Africa.

Among the SABC units grappling with this revolution is Channel Africa, a pan-African short-wave radio network, broadcasting in English, French, Portuguese, Kiswahili and two other African languages. Radio, especially short-wave radio remains a vital means of communication and information dissemination in Africa. The general lack of infrastructure means that there is heavy reliance on battery operated, and, more recently, wind-up radios not requiring batteries (designed in England and built initially in South Africa before being moved to Brazil).

Executive Editor at Channel Africa is Hans-Dieter Winkens, the essential architect and visionary behind the move to cope with the new unorganized world by downstructuring. 54-year old Hans has seen both sides of the coin, having emigrated to South Africa from the post-world war two ruins of nazi Germany as a young boy and having, decades later, worked as an administrative assistant in the former Afrikaner-dominated regime in Soweto, where Johannesburg’s black people were forced to live under apartheid.

It was the injustice that Hans observed during his work in the townships that ultimately led him to join the SABC, which was then one of the prime organs of preservation of the status quo. He soon took on the role of full-time Shop Steward in a trade union, which was seeking economic equality through traditional, organized routes. As one of the prime movers in negotiations between the union and the SABC management, Hans helped smooth the SABC’s transformation to the unorganized world at a time of radical management changes.

The fairness and integrity he showed in those negotiations established his reputation to the extent that he was called on to take on the job of Executive Editor of Channel Africa. The low worker morale caused by an absence of leadership and vision appeared to be beyond help. Indeed, it had been the major reason why Hans had initially refused to consider getting involved. One of the other reasons was that the new South African government had not committed itself to continued funding, but had hinted that the foreign broadcaster would have to become self-supporting.

Shortly after joining Channel Africa, and grappling for a method to bring about the necessary fundamental change in the company culture, strategy and structure, he turned to the Internet and located the unorganization Internet site www.unorgan.com

Intuitively following "worker-centric" sentiments and reading "unorganization" spurred Hans to use downstructuring, RATHER THAN restructuring or downsizing, to less painfully achieve the necessary transition. To this day, and despite a continued absence of firm state assurances, he has steadfastly maintained a policy of not engaging in forced retrenchment. The pressures of change have nevertheless moved more than 20% of Channel Africa’s total work force to either resign or accept a voluntary retrenchment package. Among them were quite a few people who Hans knew would thrive on the challenge of "work" versus "job and position" and were therefore encouraged to leave Channel Africa.

Downstructuring within Channel Africa involved the following initiatives:

1. "Learn to live your dream!" was the message to the small [more than 90] group of broadcasters in six languages. "Channel Africa is in the business of enhancing capacities for informed decision-making in the daily lives of millions of Africans all over the continent. It does so by way of providing appropriate news and information upon which such decisions may be based. As long as the window of state funding remains open, let’s get ourselves empowered to become excellent performers in that area. Let’s foster the African unity that will be so essential for the continent’s future, by becoming the foremost "afrocentric" news and information content providers to broadcasters all over the continent and the world. Let’s make that vision and mission WORK!"

2. "Positions" and the rules and policies entrenching the hierarchy, such as job descriptions - which coerced employee compliance and constrained employee growth - were abolished. All employees were encouraged to assume the title of "partner" and each partner was set free to change and expand their role and to explore their full potential. Basically, Channel Africa’s "employees" were told to decide for themselves by their actions who stays in the company and in which areas the company will remain active.

Crucially, however, the company’s leadership did not merely abolish administration and controls, but provided the newly liberated employees with the technological tools to support them in the transition. Downstructuring is not simply cutting administration, it is also providing people with the technology tools that amplify their presence and effectiveness and let them be all that they can be. To downstructure, you cannot just cut the employees loose. You cannot simply turn up and announce that all of those people not fully occupied and keeping busy rather than doing business are now free to find themselves some other real work to do and thereby expand their work and responsibility and learn more. Downstructuring must be accompanied by the use of new technologies both within the office and by remote employees. At the host, technologies such as intranets and dynamic authoring are needed to automate paper-based processes and simultaneously informate and liberate those employees carrying out administration. Mobile workers out of the office need laptops, mobile phones and personal telephone numbers so that they can work from wherever they are.

3. Digitalization - Channel Africa had been the first unit at the SABC headquarters to install digital audio recording and broadcast technologies. Despite clear advantages over the old analogue production techniques, Hans found that the systems had been severely under-utilized. Fear of the unknown and of their own capacities - as well as uncertainty of management reaction - had essentially suppressed system utilization and development. The rapid switch to digital technology meant that some analogue specialists faced the choice of learning to use the digital technology or to transfer to other units still using analogue technology.

Hans dispelled the handicapping myths and replaced "We can’t!" with "Let’s DO it!". Virtually all Channel Africans, even partners who had for years been cooped up in administrative desk jobs, are now doing digital audio editing and are harvesting program material. Soon, they will all be challenged to try their hand at web authoring and webcasting via Channel Africa’s new Internet site. And their personalities, capacities and capabilities will also feature, perhaps opening up new opportunities for them and for Channel Africa.

4. Supply of mobile field technologies - Hans told Channel Africa’s employees that, despite relatively good line links, news gathering did not start and stop at the company’s headquarters. [Incidentally, the structure of the SABC headquarters building still bears stark reminders of the old, rigidly structured apartheid days, when its strangely arranged elevators were separated for white and non-white people]. The newly mobile correspondents, liberated from their office desks, were given access to cellular and direct-to-satellite mobile telephones. When travelling around Africa on assignment, the correspondents can now use the mobile phones to file their reports from wherever they are, and occasionally call in and ask for advice or help.

Channel Africa "employees" were also encouraged to purchase PCs with modems and sound cards so that they could start working from home.

5. Partners are given access to all but the most private and personal (e.g. salaries) data pertaining to Channel Africa’s operations in a concerted effort to encourage debate around expenditures and value for money activities or ventures. Hans argues that such openness is essential in building team accountability and will eventually act as a self-regulating force, preventing misuse of funds. He says: "All our partners are perfectly capable of maintaining their complex economic lives. So why should they not become involved in the economics of Channel Africa? We are all mutually accountable to the South African people in the application of their tax Rands!"

Different "employees" responded differently to these changes according to the personal instincts and beliefs. As Hans emailed Simon Buckingham, the author of this book:

"Apropos unorganisation, I’m having the normal backlash from people who would prefer to be employees rather than partners and would like to revert to titles and positions linked to remuneration. Also finding it slow going with progress on entrepreneurial incentives. Establishing criteria for performance excellence through consultation and consensus is also an uphill battle, what with the multitude of perspectives brought to the discussion by so many different cultures. Non-performance linked incentives I have introduced relate mainly to Channel Africa’s [new Technology] partnership infrastructure, like sponsored Internet access, peripherals such as CD-ROM, sound cards, software, etc. IF prospective partners acquire their own PCs. That way, I can provide links for them to study and be inspired by while they are at home and set the scene for their greater independence and participation."

"So many changes, so little time! What with a dozen people climbing off the bus this month due to fear of the unorganized future, new people clamouring to be part of our new way of life, new people starting, people coming for basic introductions to the wonderful world of technology, etc. In the latter category, I now have a TV and film set designer/ dresser/ marionettist/ effects maker/ .... in her 40s learning to manipulate the mouse herself through playing solitaire on one of our machines and thus acquainting herself with the new tools in order to acquire the vital skills and thus ensure her own future.

Many regards Hans."

[That PC-trainee, NOT a Channel Africa employee, was subsequently forcibly retrenched by the SABC on recommendations by McKinsey consultants. She became one of more than 1,000 victims of outmoded bottom-line driven downsizing].

Those partners who were able to change their attitude and who were flexible and energetic enough to accept the challenges and opportunities from their new-found freedom thrived. For example, a young female reporter with a sparkle in her eyes took a satellite mobile phone and went off to cover some political elections in a remote African country. This was exclusive and groundbreaking coverage of a significant, yet virtually ignored event. As a result of the quality of such exclusives, this reporter subsequently received two job offers from other broadcasting companies covering Africa.

She declined both offers, and remains with Channel Africa, but both she and Hans know that she and other such partners now have job choices and alternative stages upon which they can perform and earn a living doing what they do best - empowered to DO it.

However, many people felt neither willing nor able to reinvent themselves and left Channel Africa altogether. They accepted severance packages, known within the SABC generally as "retrenchment packages". Their future is uncertain though, and dependent on personal attitude change: some took the sizeable sums for leaving and invested in new businesses based on their hobbies and interests. These people no doubt found new enthusiasm and drive. Others simply went home and wondered how they could get their economic life onto another track.

But then again, the positive transition to the post-apartheid world necessitated a fundamental transition from outmoded organized ways and means can never be achieved without some difficulties. You simply cannot reverse decades of folly overnight.

The greatest advantage of using downstructuring rather than downsizing or restructuring to reinvent Channel Africa was that the new leadership put "employees" in charge of their own destinies and future prosperity. Instead of being helpless at the hands of their managers, and subject to their decisions, hapless victims when decisions turn sour, the employees were given the choice: "Reinvent yourself and your job … or leave!".

Summary

We have seen throughout this book how technology tools such as Internet email, laptop computers and mobile phones are facilitating the unorganization of business organizations through programs to increase use of practices such as teleworking, outsourcing and partnering. Companies can thereby become more flexible and global and yet simultaneously maintain and enhance communication within and around the company. New technologies facilitate new ways of working. Companies looking to survive and thrive in the 21^st century need to embrace and implement these unorganization practices.

If I was a company director looking to unorganize my organization to align it more closely to the very different operating environment in the 21^st century, I would choose one of these unorganization practices and implement it. If your costs are too high, reduce them by outsourcing non-strategic tasks. If you have a great offering that too few people are using, find some suitable business partners. If office space is in short supply, identify groups of people who can telework. Provide mobile workers with the right communications technologies to make the job allocation and customer service process more efficient. Gather knowledge.

And above all else, remember that it is not sufficient to simply deploy new technologies and continue with the old management practices. Management and organization need to be aligned, just as environment and organization do. Harmony is the goal- do what comes naturally. As someone rightly said, you have to combine "high tech with high touch". The technologies are just a means to an end, as are the practices. At the end of the day, the key thing is that everything we do in organizational contexts is business and not busyness! All companies and individuals must repeatedly ask themselves whether their actions are business or business and ensure that they eliminate existing and imminent busyness whilst maximizing the business that gets done.

The main barrier to implementing unorganization in companies is likely to be the vested interests of managers keen to maintain their existing power bases. The technologies certainly exist and companies. Attitude lags reality. It is a challenge for managers to change their company- to recognize that in fact the same ends of profits and income can be achieved via very different unorganized ends. Decision makers have to recognize that in setting their employees free from their offices and desks, they are in fact also making them more and not less accountable. It is also hard for individual employees to make the change- they need to motivate themselves to work from home, discipline themselves to communicate routinely and regularly with people and overcome the guilt they feel about not continuously working at their job all day long. Everyone in the company that is unorganizing needs to get the right attitude and the right execution- to see what is possible and then make it happen. Change in the unorganized world is inevitable. So make sure it is enjoyable.

Feedback

This book is at the junction of at least two others published on https://www.unorgan.com "Unorganization: The Business Handbook" and "Unorganization: The Individual Handbook". The former analyzes the old organized forms of organizations and systematically suggests theoretical alternatives. The later is much more about employment in the unorganized world where employees are "branders" creating opportunities for themselves. The "unorganization" author Simon Buckingham welcomes all feedback is happy to enter into a dialog with companies looking to make a change for the unorganized world. Send an email to simon@unorgan.com He hopes that you will not simply read this book, but implement it too.

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