I Don’t Think I Fully Agree … Fishnets

.. with this statement lifted from the recent Globe and Mail review of Gary Hamel’s book The Future of Management.

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The End of Management As We Know It ?

[ Snip … ]

We also must learn from the Internet’s example of widespread, leaderless collaborative effort. "The Web has evolved faster than anything human beings have created – largely because it is not a hierarchy. The Web is all periphery, and no centre," he observes.

We can use those examples to build a democracy of ideas in organizations, amplifying rather than dampening human imagination, dynamically reallocating resources, aggregating the collective wisdom in our workplaces, minimizing the drag of mental models, and turning employees from an army of conscripts into a community of volunteers.

That’s a tall order. But it’s a tall book. He builds his ideas carefully and with discipline, in stages taking us through the challenges facing management, examples of maverick management to draw upon, ideas from elsewhere to consider, and then shows how to bring that together into a new formula for management that resembles Web 2.0 rather than 19th century thinking.

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Specifically … when it comes to applying to organizations the networked structures the Web affords, and the principles of the behaviours it engenders, I don’t quite fully agree with the observation that "The Web is all periphery, and no centre".

Technically speaking, I think that is correct.