Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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as an “organizational tent,” exploiting benefits that structural designers traditionally regarded as liabilities: “Ambiguous authority structures, unclear objectives, and contradictory assignments of responsibility that can legitimize controversies and challenge traditions. Incoherence and indecision can foster exploration, self‐evaluation, and learning” (Hedberg, Nystrom, and Starbuck, 1976, p. 45). Inconsistencies and contradictions in an adhocracy become paradoxes whereby a balance between opposites protects an organization from falling into an either‐or trap.
Ad hoc structures thrive in conditions of turbulence and rapid change. Examples are advertising agencies, think‐tank consulting firms, and the recording industry. A successful and durable example of an adhocracy is W. L. Gore, producer of Gore‐Tex, vascular stents, dental floss, and many other products built on its pioneering development of advanced polymer materials. When he founded the company in 1958, Bill Gore conceived it as an organization where “there would be no layers of management, information would flow freely in all directions, and personal communications would be the norm. And individuals and self‐managed teams would go directly to anyone in the organization to get what they needed to be successful.” (Hamel, 2010).
Half a century later, Gore has more than 10,000 employees (Gore calls them “associates”) and some $3 billion in annual sales, but still adheres to Bill Gore's principles. In Gore's “lattice” structure, people don't have bosses. Instead, the company relies on “natural leaders”—individuals who can attract talent, build teams, and get things done. One test: if you call a meeting and no one comes, you're probably not a leader. When Gore's CEO retired in 2005, the board polled associates to find out whom they would be willing to follow. They weren't given a slate—they could nominate anyone. No one was more surprised than Terri Kelly when she became the people's choice. She acknowledges that Gore's approach carries a continuing risk of chaos. It helps, she says, that the culture has clear norms and values, but
Our leaders have to do an incredible job of internal selling to get the organization to move. The process is sometimes frustrating, but we believe that if you spend more time up front, you'll have associates who are not only fully bought‐in, but committed to achieving the outcome. Along the way, they'll also help to refine the idea and make the decision better. (Hamel, 2010)
Helgesen's Web of Inclusion
Mintzberg's five‐sector imagery adds a new dimension to the conventional line‐staff organization chart but retains some of the traditional image of structure as a top‐down pyramid. Helgesen argues that the idea of hierarchy is primarily a male‐driven depiction, quite different from structures created by female executives:
The women I studied had built profoundly integrated and organic organizations in which the focus was on nurturing good relationships; in which the niceties of hierarchical rank and distinction played little part; and in which lines of communication were multiplicitous, open, and diffuse. I noted that women tended to put themselves at the center of their organizations rather than at the top, thus emphasizing both accessibility and equality, and that they labored constantly to include people in their decision‐making. (Helgesen, 1995, p. 10)
Helgesen coined the expression “web of inclusion” to depict an organic form more circular than hierarchical. The web builds from the center out. Its architect works much like a spider, spinning new threads of connection and reinforcing existing strands. The web's center and periphery are interconnected; action in one place ripples across the entire configuration, forming “an interconnected cosmic web in which the threads of all forces and events form an inseparable net of endlessly, mutually conditioned relations” (Fritjof Capra, quoted in Helgesen, 1995, p. 16). Consequently, weaknesses in either the center or the periphery of the web undermine the strength of the natural network.
A famous example of web organization is “Linux, Inc.,” the loose organization of individuals and organizations that has formed around Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open‐source operating system Linux, whose many variants power most of the world's supercomputers, cell phones, stock markets, and web domains. “Linux, Inc.” is anything but a traditional company:
There's no headquarters, no CEO, and no annual report. It's not a single company, but a cooperative venture. More than 13,000 developers from more than 1,300 companies along with thousands of individual volunteers have contributed to the Linux code. The Linux community, Torvalds says, is like a huge spider web, or better yet, multiple spider webs representing dozens of related open‐source projects. His office is “near where those webs intersect.” (Hamm, 2005)
Freewheeling web or lattice structures may encounter increasing challenges as an organization gets bigger. When Meg Whitman became CEO of Internet phenomenon eBay in 1998, she joined an organization of fewer than fifty employees configured in an informal web around founder Pierre Omidyar. When she tried to set up appointments with her new staff, she was surprised to learn that scheduled meetings were a foreign concept in a company where no one kept a calendar. Omidyar had built a company with a strong culture and powerful sense of community but no explicit strategy, no regular meetings, no marketing department, and almost no other identifiable structural elements. Despite the company's phenomenal growth and profitability, Whitman concluded that it was in danger of imploding without more structure and discipline. Omidyar agreed. He had worked hard to recruit Whitman because he believed she brought the big‐company management experience that eBay needed to keep growing (Hill and Farkas, 2000).
GENERIC ISSUES IN RESTRUCTURING
Eventually, internal or external changes force every structure to adjust, but structural change is rarely easy. When the Roman Catholic Church elevated a new pope, Francis I, in March, 2013, many hoped that he would represent a breath of fresh air after the troubled reign of his predecessor. But a well‐placed insider noted how difficult this would be, even for a supposedly‐absolute ruler: “There have been a number of Popes in succession with different personalities, but the structure remains the same. Whoever is appointed, they get absorbed by the structure. Instead of you transforming the structure, the structure transforms you” (Donadio and Yardley, 2013).
When the time for restructuring comes, managers need to take account of tensions specific to each structural configuration. Consultants and managers often apply general principles and specific answers without recognizing key differences across architectural forms. Reshaping an adhocracy, for example, is different from restructuring a machine bureaucracy, and reweaving a web is very different from nudging a professional bureaucracy. Falling victim to the one‐best‐system or one‐size‐fits‐all mentality is a route to disaster. But the comfort of a well‐defined prescription lulls too many managers into a temporary comfort zone. They don't see the iceberg looming ahead until they crash into it.
Mintzberg's imagery depiction suggests general principles to guide restructuring across a range of circumstances. Each major component of his model exerts its own pressures. Restructuring triggers a multidirectional tug‐of‐war that eventually determines the shape of the emerging configuration. The result may be a catastrophe, unless leaders recognize and manage various pushes and pulls.
The strategic apex—top management—tends to exert centralizing pressures. Through commands, rules, or less obtrusive means, top managers continually try to develop a unified mission or strategy. Deep down, they long for a simple structure they can control. By contrast, middle managers resist control from the top and tend to pull the organization toward balkanization. Navy captains, school principals, plant managers, department heads, and bureau chiefs become committed to their own domain and seek to protect and enhance their unit's parochial interests. Tensions between centripetal forces from the top and centrifugal forces from middle management are especially prominent in divisionalized structures but are critical issues in any restructuring effort.
The technostructure exerts pressures to standardize; analysts love discipline and hate anarchy. They want to measure and monitor the organization's progress against well‐defined criteria. Depending on the circumstances, they counterbalance (or complement) top administrators, who want to centralize, and middle managers, who seek greater autonomy. A college professor who wants