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The Corporate Lattice
Achieving High Performance In the Changing World of Work
By Benko, Cathleen Harvard Business Press
Copyright © 2010 Benko, Cathleen
All right reserved. ISBN: 9781422155165
The world of work is at an inflection point. The hierarchical corporate ladder is giving way to a multidimensional corporate latticeTM.
Firmly rooted in the industrial age, the corporate ladder has been the prevailing paradigm for how an enterprise is organized and how it manages its work and people. At its heart, the ladder depends on an inflexible organizational worldview in which prestige, rewards, information access, and power are tied to the rung each employee occupies. Its one-size-fits-all approach assumes employees are more alike than different. The ladder is built on a top-down, 9-to-5 notion of when, where, and how work gets done. It defines career success as a linear climb to the top.
Still today, this antiquated model continues to shape the ways organizations—sometimes consciously and sometimes not—operate. The mental image of a ladder is etched in our corporate consciousness and has obscured, until now, the sea change already underway.
Workplaces aren’t what they used to be. Organizational structures are flatter, challenging traditional talent development models that primarily rely on upward progression. Knowledge and services work dominate the economy. Much of this work is less bound to a physical location than traditional production processes. As a result of technological advances and globalization, workers are less tethered to traditional offices and set hours. And the makeup of work is changing, too. There are 40 times more projects today than 20 years ago, heightening the need for teamwork. Work is changing so fast that the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 60 percent of all new jobs in the 21st century will require skills that only 20 percent of current employees possess.
The workforce isn’t what it used to be either. Family structures have changed markedly, with profound implications for a corporate ladder model predicated on a household arrangement that, by and large, no longer exists to support it. Up until the 1960s, two-thirds of U.S. households were traditional, defined as Dad going off to work while Mom stayed at home. That number today is down to 17 percent. Women now comprise half of the U.S. workforce, and almost 40 percent are the primary breadwinners for their families. Men in dual-career, dual-caregiver couples now cite more work-life conflict than women. Younger generations are bringing different attitudes to work at the same time that older workers are looking for options to stay in the labor market. Seventy percent of baby boomers and 92 percent of millennial cite career-life fit as a top priority. And along just about every dimension, employees are more diverse. By 2042, the U.S. workforce will be majority nonwhite.
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Excerpted from The Corporate Lattice by Benko, Cathleen Copyright © 2010 by Benko, Cathleen. Excerpted by permission.
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