Zero Space defines a business model in which an organization achieves success without owning assets or needing management. In a zero space organization, knowledge is the only true currency and people are the business's assets and its investors in future success.
Through eight new organizational principles the authors illustrate how "zero-mindedness" is essential for the new economy. Just as organizations will have to exist in less tangible, less prescribed forms, so will thinking have to become less departmentalized, less closely guarded. This new open-mindedness or "zero mind-set" targets knowledge so that an organization applies it when and where it is really needed.
The authors-two top executives at one of the "big five" accounting and consulting firms-show how to create a zero-space organization: a value-adding, quick-reacting, non-centralized, non-standardized, innovation-generating workplace for dedicated talent.
Zero Space defines a business model in which an organization achieves success without owning assets or needing management. In a zero space organization, knowledge is the only true currency and people are the business's assets and its investors in future success.
Through eight new organizational principles the authors illustrate how "zero-mindedness" is essential for the new economy. Just as organizations will have to exist in less tangible, less prescribed forms, so will thinking have to become less departmentalized, less closely guarded. This new open-mindedness or "zero mind-set" targets knowledge so that an organization applies it when and where it is really needed.
The authors-two top executives at one of the "big five" accounting and consulting firms-show how to create a zero-space organization: a value-adding, quick-reacting, non-centralized, non-standardized, innovation-generating workplace for dedicated talent.
Zero Space: Moving Beyond Organizational Limits
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Zero Space: Moving Beyond Organizational Limits
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Overview
Zero Space defines a business model in which an organization achieves success without owning assets or needing management. In a zero space organization, knowledge is the only true currency and people are the business's assets and its investors in future success.
Through eight new organizational principles the authors illustrate how "zero-mindedness" is essential for the new economy. Just as organizations will have to exist in less tangible, less prescribed forms, so will thinking have to become less departmentalized, less closely guarded. This new open-mindedness or "zero mind-set" targets knowledge so that an organization applies it when and where it is really needed.
The authors-two top executives at one of the "big five" accounting and consulting firms-show how to create a zero-space organization: a value-adding, quick-reacting, non-centralized, non-standardized, innovation-generating workplace for dedicated talent.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781576751824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2002 |
| Edition description: | 1ST |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.85(d) |
About the Author
Before joining KPMG, Lekanne Deprez was a research associate at Tilburg University and held management and functional positions at Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM). From 1995 to 1997, he was manager of market and product development at Galileo Nederland, Ltd. He is coauthor of Value-Based Knowledge Management (1998) and The Knowledge Dividend (2000).
René Tissen is managing director of KPMG Knowledge Advisory Services and professor of business management at the School of Business at Nyenrode University, The Netherlands. As an inter-
national consultant and researcher, he specializes in advising companies on boardroom-level matters involving knowledge management, organization, and human resource management. Previously, he held a number of executive and senior management positions in Dutch industry and government, as well as positions abroad.
René Tissen is coauthor of Value-Based Knowledge Management (1998), The Knowledge Dividend (2000), Weightless Wealth (2000), Telling IT Like IT Is (2002), and Seven Deadly Sins of Management (2002).
Read an Excerpt
Zero Space
MOVING BEYOND ORGANIZATIONAL LIMITSBy Frank Lekanne Deprez René Tissen
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2002 Frank Lekanne Deprez and René TissenAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57675-182-4
Chapter One
Zero Rules
Marketplaces are changing. Even our definition of doing business is changing. And unless organizations change too, their chance of success decreases by the minute. This is something fundamentally different from the reorganizing that many companies did too much of in the past. The focus is now on sustainable growth and unlimited potential.
Moving the Organization into the Knowledge-Based Economy
Traditionally, a company involved a number of employees who worked in a series of corporate buildings and supplied a product or a service in a well-defined marketplace. Today, that is no longer how companies are defined. They are in constant flux, looking for new ways to add value anytime, anyplace, anywhere. And it is obvious that this new fluidity cannot be put into an old organizational bottle.
The most significant reason for this change is the move to the knowledge-based economy. Knowledge-intensive companies are no longer the exception; they are the norm. And knowledge companies find that they cannot hem themselves into traditional buildings and rigid organizational structures. Today's business possibilities seem endless—and so do the work possibilities. With the rapid dissemination of IT, professionals are no longer bound by time or space. The twenty-four-hour economy has made the former archaic; working on-line or off-line has made the latter meaningless. Mobile phones, laptops, Internet access, e-mail, these are far more important in the knowledge-based economy than are buildings or desks.
Although some people thrive on such unlimited possibilities, others—perhaps most—feel threatened by them. They are afraid that they will lose their sense of belonging, that they will soon be working for a company with no true identity. They fear that they will simply float across some endless, uncharted sea. The fear of isolation increases, and they have nothing tangible on which to rely. The boundaries that have long prescribed their world are disintegrating. The traditional divisions—insourcing and outsourcing, lines of authority and responsibility—are becoming so vague as to be virtually irrelevant.
Some fear that if the boundaries are removed, the company will cease to exist. For, they maintain, boundaries define the company. But today's business environment does not allow for comfort; boundaries must be constantly questioned, redefined, and transcended. So the question that must be answered is this: Where does an organization start and where does it end?
As former labor secretary R. B. Reich wrote, the challenge for management today is to turn old-line companies into on-line companies. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that you could never step in the same stream twice. Today, the stream of business is becoming a torrent, sweeping companies forward. They may not know where they're going, but they do know there is no benefit in trying to fight the currents.
For many years, management concentrated on the business of relations: customer relations, public relations, employee relations. All were aimed at one thing: maintaining the status quo. Any disturbances—whether internal or external—had to be eliminated, any turbulence had to be calmed. Reich calls those who manage these relations heat shields.
"Think of them as heat shields," he writes, "who dampen, deflect, or moderate the demands coming from inside and outside the organization, telling the company that it has to change. In the knowledge-based economy, heat shields, who think that they are the company's staunchest defenders, become the company's worst enemies—by protecting it too well from demanding customers, clients, and constituents."
Heat shields, like boundaries, can no longer be tolerated. Although it may have been possible for them to protect a company's tangible assets, they have little effect on intangibles. Knowledge, information, ideas, and concepts all flow freely, ignoring artificial barriers.
Yet if companies traditionally gained their identity by setting up boundaries—between themselves and the competition, between one marketplace and another, between one department, division, or even business unit and another—and guaranteed their ability to function by creating rigid organizational structures, how will they work in a world in which the very scaffolding of structure is being dismantled?
In the same way that technologies evolve faster than a business's abilities to absorb them, businesses evolve faster than their managers' abilities to develop new and more suitable organizational forms. And so we repeat the question: Where does an organization start and where does it end?
The answer is in zero space. In zero space, all matter—whether tangible or intangible, large or small—is linked. Value networks exist at every level. Such networks—fluid, adaptable, changeable, challenging—replace the rigid structures of the old industrial thinking.
So is zero space a void, a vacuum, in which there is a total lack of control?
M. J. Hatch uses improvisational jazz as powerful metaphor to describe empty space in organizations. Although there is a harmonic structure, it does not restrict the performers but rather frees them. It is a structure that supports but does not specify. Jazz musicians never accept the status quo; the structure is there for them as a guideline but they want to investigate the freedom, not the restrictions. In jazz, not playing structures—just allowing the structures to remain implied, a basis—creates the space a musician needs to improvise in.
For companies in the knowledge-based economy, structure or organization must become implicit rather than explicit. There must be room for intuitive thinking, for a spontaneity that enables organizational members to anticipate and proactively sense the opportunities that depend to a large extent on their ability to improvise. The organization must create space that allows for flights of fancy and creativity. Creativity is a natural function of the mind, as natural as breathing. Thinking outside the box, where there is room for surprises and creativity, will determine the structure; strategy, which largely depends on a strict plotting of events, will no longer be something planned in advance but rather something that evolves naturally. After all, how do you chart a path through unknown territory?
According to Richard D'Aveni, professor of strategic management at Dartmouth College, "Say Lewis and Clark want to go West. They know there is a general direction of progress for their industry. That's all they know. So they climb the first hill and when they get to the top they look around and point to the next hill in the general direction and say to themselves: 'That looks reasonably easy to climb,' and they set off in that direction. Is it the most efficient way to move? To find a path from one hill to another? Most probably not. But in the end they stumble onto things that they most probably wouldn't have come across if they had got a map and planned the shortest path from A to B."
In today's rapidly changing times, we sometimes feel that we are not only in uncharted territory but also surrounded by a thick mist. Signposts loom up before us; we must be flexible enough to change direction at the shortest notice. But that is virtually impossible if our companies are straitjacketed into strict, formal hierarchies.
Zero space offers freedom of movement, freedom of operation, freedom to allow fantasy to take us into new territories where we can achieve our business goal of adding value.
Sharing Space
Just as organizational boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, so too are the boundaries between market areas. Companies no longer compete in clearly defined market areas but rather in abstract space. The old concepts of personal space, of invading space, will be relegated to the past. In their place must come the awareness that no company will ever again be able to dominate one area of business space. No company can "own" space; all have to learn to share it. Mahanbir Sawhney, professor of electronic commerce and technology at Northwestern University, and David Parikh, management consultant at PRTM, Silicon Valley, write, "The Net has destroyed the old lines dividing businesses, markets, industries, and geographies."
As companies transform themselves into zero space organizations the true challenge is not just to exist in that space but also actively to share it. Intangibles—knowledge, ideas, concepts—are the new corporate assets. Ideas have never recognized borders. Concepts have always leaped continents. And knowledge is more swiftly disseminated throughout the world today than at any time in our history.
Any organizational structure must recognize this free flow of ideas. While ensuring as much as possible that these intangibles first add value to the company's own operations (that is, after all, the very reason for being in business), it must also eliminate the constraints that can impede the flow between people operating in the same space.
Many companies have been persuaded that networks, whether electronic or personal, are the answer to all their problems. And indeed, networks can engender a feeling of belonging. But if they are to be successful, they must be accessible to everyone. The danger that we are constantly seeing is that such networks are used to share an experience rather than to create a shared experience. The difference is not just a play on words; it is a fundamental attitude that must be addressed very seriously indeed.
Zero space organizations operate independently of time, geography, and matter. They help define the shared space in which knowledge, people, and technology can constantly combine and recombine. They provide ever-changing, ever-evolving connections that are the basis for a shared experience.
Chapter Two
The Currency of Zero Space
Two friends meet for a drink. As they leave the bar, one of them realizes he has no cash on him. His friend gives him $10 for his cab fare home. So now that friend has $10 less while the other has $10 more. During their evening together, the two shared a lot of thoughts. One friend told the other about an idea of his, and the other did the same. Now both friends are one idea richer, but neither is an idea poorer.
Sharing knowledge enriches people, and it also enriches companies. It is a situation in which one plus one is always infinitely more than two. So companies must allow ideas and knowledge to move freely, for then this knowledge can multiply and add value.
But many managers still believe that knowledge withheld is power. So companies in which knowledge is shared freely must prove that they have the advantage over those that hoard or hide it. Furthermore, they must understand when to share and when not to share knowledge.
Sharing knowledge is a critical business success factor because it raises the level of quality thinking. But in any organizational setting—whether off-site or on-site, off-line or on-line, physical or virtual—the longer knowledge has been around, the less valuable it usually is. The so-called decay factor makes knowledge stale, out of date, obsolete, superseded, or even incorrect. Every individual's knowledge is strongly challenged by the decay factor. The sell-by date of certain professional knowledge (about stocks, information technology, people) is extremely short. That's why a brain-connecting approach that focuses on freely communicating valuable knowledge can inspire and persuade people to share their views and their knowledge.
Four Types of Companies Today
The potential for adding value is a crucial ingredient for success. We call this the knova (knowledge value) factor. It is determined by two factors: a company's knowledge intensity and the service level it provides. As shown in Figure 1, we have defined four broad categories of companies today: the industrial production company, the service-providing company, the knowledge-creating company, and the value-adding knowledge company.
Industrial Production Companies
Examples of old-style industrial companies are getting increasingly difficult to find. Even producing a simple beer can require an enormous amount of knowledge. So even production companies are having to get more knowledge-intensive.
Service-Providing Companies
A typical example of a service-providing company is an employment agency. These agencies originally emerged to satisfy the need of many companies for additional staff. It was often time consuming for companies to recruit temporary staff by themselves, so they avoided the hassle by turning to an agency. This was particularly true when staff was needed for only a limited period—to take over work from an employee on holiday or maternity leave, for example—and therefore could not be offered a fulltime contract. However, contingent workers can be useful in a number of less traditional ways. Nowadays, there is part-time work, temporary employment, employee leasing, self-employment, insourcing, outsourcing, and home-based work. Virtually any work arrangement that might differ from the commonly perceived norm of full-time salaried job falls under the rubric of contingent work today. However, agencies do even more than provide these different types of workers. They have recognized that a high level of service is vital in what is becoming a highly competitive industry. How they supply staff has thus become more flexible; they may be offered for temporary work but also for longer periods on a contract or even for permanent employment.
The market for employment has become more transparent. It is easier for potential employers to reach potential employees than ever before. The Internet is proving particularly suitable for bringing together employer and employee. The agencies are under pressure; their traditional services are no longer enough to guarantee them future stability. So in order to continue adding value for their customers, they too have had to become more knowledge-intensive—that is, have a greater knowledge of both the candidates and the vacancies so a perfect match can be made. For this, increasingly sophisticated information systems are being used. In addition, many agencies are increasing the services they offer their clients by introducing training for the candidates, organizing seminars, and even establishing schools and academies for potential candidates.
Knowledge-Creating Companies and Value-Adding Knowledge Companies
I. Nonaka, H. Takeuchi, and K. Umemoto write: "Creating new knowledge is ... not simply a matter of learning from others or acquiring knowledge from the outside. It has to build on its own, frequently requiring intensive and laborious interaction among members of the organization. ... Western managers need to 'unlearn' their old mode of thinking that all knowledge is explicit and can be acquired and taught through manuals, books, or lectures."
In their groundbreaking book The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi stress the importance of knowledge creation in modern companies. But as the knova factor indicates, this is not enough. Companies are not in business to create knowledge but to add value. The knova factor shows that for a company to be successful in the emerging knowledge economy it will not be enough to concentrate on increasing either service levels or the knowledge intensity of its activities. Rather, both the level of service and the level of knowledge content need to increase to allow a company to move to greater success.
For many years, Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport has been nominated by international travelers as the best airport in the world. On the surface, the airport provides the same facilities as airports anywhere in the world: runways, terminals, service areas. Its success is the result of an ongoing determination to put the customer first. Management has the ability to see service and business through the customer's eyes. Attention has been given to matters such as signposting, space, light, convenient transfer support, train connections, and just plain fun. Passengers in the terminal can enjoy a wide range of facilities, including shops, offices, hotels, showers, restaurants, even a casino. The Schiphol Group, which manages the airport, knows how to create and exploit airport cities. It has successfully transferred its unique experience and expertise to other international airports, such as JFK in New York and Brisbane Airport in Australia. It is a value-adding knowledge company that not only services its customers best but exploits its unique knowledge and experience on a worldwide basis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zero Space by Frank Lekanne Deprez René Tissen Copyright © 2002 by Frank Lekanne Deprez and René Tissen. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction: Time to Break Out
Part I The Power of Zero Mindedness
Chapter 1: Zero Rules
Chapter 2: The Currency of Zero Space
Part II The Eight Key Features of Zero Space
Chapter 3: Zero Space—Infinite Potential
Chapter 4: Zero Matter
Chapter 5: Zero Time
Chapter 6: Zero Value Gap
Chapter 7: Zero Learning Lag
Chapter 8: Zero Management
Chapter 9: Zero Resistance
Chapter 10: Zero Exclusion
Chapter 11: Zero Tech
Part III Launching into Zero Space
Chapter 12: Zeroing in on Reality
Chapter 13: Networking with Networks
Chapter 14: Partnerships: Releasing the Power of Unlike Minds
Chapter 15: Communing into Zero Space
Chapter 16: Information Technology: Spider or Fly?
Chapter 17: What’s in Store?
Chapter 18: Making People the Nonzeros of Zero Space
Chapter 19: Breaking Free
Notes
Index
About the Authors