In today's fast-paced global business environment, the conventional model of the corporation and its management principles no longer deliver results. Economic upheaval, changing demographics, and technological revolution have forever altered the requirements for running a business today. Now, in response,The Centerless Corporationpresents a radical new corporate model -- designed for your organization's survival, growth, and prosperity.Drawing on groundbreaking research they conducted at Booz Allen & Hamilton, Bruce A. Pasternack and Albert J. Viscio offer a comprehensive strategy for managing in turbulent times. To deal with increasing complexity, they contend, leaders must abandon their command-and-control mentality and establish a model in which responsibility and accountability are distributed throughout the organization, employees are regarded as valued resources, and knowledge flows freely. Illustrating their ideas with invaluable real-life examples, Pasternack and Viscio explain how to attract and develop leaders, build coherence to unite all parts of an organization, and restructure business units and corporate roles to add value rather than overhead.

Bruce Pasternack and Albert Viscio are the founding partners of Booz • Allen & Hamilton's Strategic Leadership Practice, which focuses on serving top management of the world's corporations in areas of organization, leadership, transformation, and corporate renewal. They have over thirty years of combined experience with this prestigious global management and technology consulting firm and have published extensively in the areas of growth, globalization, people strategy, and leadership.

Contents

Preface

One: A Model for Tomorrow

Two: Business Space in the Age of Global Specialization

Three: The Triumph of People Power

Four: Mining the Riches in Knowledge

Five: The Fine Art of Coherence

Six: A Core Not a Center

Seven: The Elastic Building Block

Eight: Governing in Turbulence

Nine: The Sharing of Services

Ten: Leading the Centerless Corporation

Eleven: Steps in a Transformation

Note on Sources

Selected References

Index

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Preface

This book was born out of upheaval. It is rooted in our experiences working with top executives at large corporations around the world trying to grapple with the turmoil in their business environments. In our interactions we noticed a decided change in what executives wanted. While still mightily concerned with cost structure, business process reengineering, and maximizing operational effectiveness, they had shifted their focus to issues of how to be more effective global organizations, how to build capabilities for faster growth, how to attract and retain the very best people, how to become a true learning organization, and how to develop leaders at all levels in the company.

The heightened interest in these sweeping issues was coming at a time of very specific changes in the business climate, changes that question the fundamentals of how companies have been constructed and managed for most of this century. Technology, especially in terms of computing and communications, has radically altered the requirements for building and managing a successful business. Distance is becoming a shrinking barrier. Geographic proximity is no longer essential for people to work together. At times, in fact, it may be an inhibitor to getting the best work done.

Competition is now based more on capabilities than assets. Firms compete, not by acquiring market share, but by doing things consistently better than the competition, driving the marketplace, and creating more business space for themselves. Knowledge and learning are now critical elements of success. As a result, companies are becoming more aware of processes for building and using knowledge.

Stepped-up emphasis on knowledge and capabilities means that people become even more important, and the relationship between the company and its people is changing rapidly. Firms need access to explicit skills, which in today's fast-moving world become obsolete so much quicker. What should firms do to ensure access to skills? What should they do with people whose skills no longer match the needs? And how does one address evolving demographics? Dual career couples are the norm. Family values and personal time are at a premium. Old-style employee loyalty is dead.

Booz • Allen & Hamilton is a global technology and management consulting firm. Through our encounters with our clients, we recognized a common thread across these types of issues. This prompted us to create a firm-wide task force to understand the issues better, to assess the implications to our clients, and to develop a perspective on what companies should do. This activity was part of our own knowledge program. The task force included partners and staff from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and represented a cross section of industry practices. The team was given a full-time staff. The research lasted for over a year. It was a major investment of the firm.

The initial charter of the task force was to look at the evolving role of the corporate center. Early in the process, it became obvious to us that we had to broaden the scope to include the other elements of the corporation -- its business units, governance, and services. We drew from case studies of client engagements and from desktop research. The work was refined by constant testing in the marketplace of ideas.

What resulted from the massive foundation of knowledge assembled by the task force were the outlines of a radically different corporate model. We came to call it the Centerless Corporation.

In the course of our research, we examined a landscape of organizational experiments where companies pioneered novel approaches to deal with the increasing speed and complexity of both their external business environment and their internal workings. It was out of that experimentation that we saw the emergence of this new organizational model. However, we did not find the new model. Rather we saw indications of pieces of it across a growing number of companies. We stitched this mosaic together and in that way defined the Centerless Corporation.

We found that large firms, in particular, have been facing almost insurmountable challenges to transform. Many have suffered through repeated reengineerings and downsizings, and yet failed to thrive. The failure of many of these improvement efforts has been the topic of recent studies which have shown that, for the most part, much of the pain of downsizing was either ineffective or insufficient to revive performance over a sustained period. Something important was missing from the solutions.

The biggest target of restructuring has been the corporate center. Some of the efforts resulted in thousands of people being moved out. Staff reductions of 50 percent and more have become the norm. In fact, now we see a backlash against removing capabilities of corporate groups.

Wave after wave of downsizings have been accompanied by significant restructuring of corporate portfolios. Current conventional wisdom dictates that firms should streamline and simplify their portfolios. Today we are witnessing a dismantling of the corporate world. The volume of spin-offs from large corporations more than doubled during the period 1994 to 1996, when it exceeded $50 billion.

As we delved deeper into the subject, it became clear to us that complexity is really the critical factor. While the size of today's corporation is approaching staggering proportions, the ability of management to achieve their desired results is weakening. Again and again, we hear the question, "Can a large company grow at a fast pace?" The solution being promulgated by many gurus is to get smaller. Shed businesses and focus. But guess what? We see many focused businesses struggling at the same time that some highly diversified ones are flourishing.

It seemed to us that the limiting factor in successfully growing and globalizing is not complexity itself. Rather, it is the tools businesses have to deal with it. The current paradigm under which businesses are built and run is a century old. Modified, yes, but still old. While there is value in something that is tried and true, there is no value in something that is obsolete. The next generation of leading firms will be the ones best able to deal with complexity. They will step outside the endless debate of centralization or decentralization and will do both at the same time.

Leading firms will infuse the means to unleash the potential of their organizations by changing the roles within the organization. We hope we can help show them the way. In this book, we will introduce new terminology like "key enablers" and the "Global Core" to help explain our new model. We will describe new organizational roles, how to develop the leaders required to bring these companies the practical guidance they need, and the steps to be taken to transform a company into the Centerless Corporation. To be sure, all of this will require a fresh mind-set, but we believe there is little choice. From all that we see, we expect that those that become a Centerless Corporation will be the winners and the leaders in the coming decades.

Excerpted from The Centerless Corporation: A New Model for Transforming Your Organization for Growth and Prosperity by Bruce A. Pasternack, Albert J. Viscio, Frank Asch
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.