Distribute executive authority and responsibility between the crowd. tapping into ideas, customer-focused knowledge, transparency, and Innovation making the organization more adaptable, accountable and inspiring, fostering passion along the way, and eliminate legacy top-down hierarchical structures.

Problem

CEO has been always been considered the person with ultimate control, one with highest authority and responsibility. Hence, one with highest passion and motivation to achieve. This is mainly due to the position's access to key information, vision, and organizational mission. These values have been difficult to propagate downward and they have been expensive to the organization and one very challenging task leading to low morale, low quality and low productivity. There has not been a natural way to solve i

Unfortunately, due to historical facts, the evolution of management and leadership has gone through the bronze and agricultural ages, imperial expansions and the civilizations needed to compete on acquiring more land to capture more rich resources of metal and fertile land. For survival, economy based on struggle had to be based on mistrust, competition and fragile cooperation evolved management systems based on bad intentions.

Hierarchical structure is one of the evolutionary baggages management and leadership have inherited from the need of their ancestral systems, which were adapted to dependence on physically and emotionally individuals to lead the crowd of individuals who settled for lesser purpose and meaning.

Leadership was problem-oriented, concerned with overcoming mountains of challenges, obstacles and solving day-to-day problems while marching forward to reach strategical positions before enemies in order to win the competition. Kingdoms had been always challenged with expanding vs. securing its newly acquired status. During these ages, were vision and decision, information and knowledge, were only shared amongst the top of the structure, vast human intelligence were wasted, which lead to less prosperous nations.

Solution

Radically rethinking the roles of managers and leaders from current idea of highly competent individuals to the roles being played by the crowd. The old thinking is only suitable for an economy that has gone extinct. In the new economy of knowledge, this has to be changed. This requires genetically engineering current holistic systems, which is hindering the unleashing of distributed intelligence and powerful natural values and knowledge.

In the new flat economy, management and leadership systems, access to and flow of information, and distributed design of decision-making and vision-setting will give rise to "targeted values". Values that are meaningful to a set of individuals and groups, that might at the same time be meaningless to others, will naturally be created.

The new system will naturally redefine business plans and performance measures, which will adapt quickly to new situations and context in a quickly-changing world based on knowledge economy. Unlike the old world, the new world is not based on wars, conquests and mistrust. Rather, the new economy is based on trust, openness, knowledge and collaboration. This leads to the realization of the importance of the elimination of structures that will strict flow of information. Systems of organization that are the ultimate risk to organizations.

Planning and executing will be focused on the edge brining in buy-in and accountability, and integration will be created through service/provider and cost/benefit economics eliminating self-interest and organization-interest boundaries.

Practical Impact

Considerable economical impact will be realized through stakeholder loyality (in leu of cusotmer-loyality and employee-loyality) improved quality and productivity, cost-saving due to innovative ideas from customers, volunteers, team-members, community, nonprofit organizations, governments and other stakeholders.

Utilization of collective intelligence has been field-proven since the beginning of Internet, which demonstrated its power to drive emotions, detect and quickly capitalize on opportunities, and innovate new ways to provide different solutions aways from problem-oriented thinking.

First Steps

Economy has already changed and we have already entered a new age, and hence we are, as Eric Hoffer said, "beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists". However, change has to be managed. And there is only one first-step in this case, which not coincidently stated by Hoffer in the start of his wise saying quoted above: "In times of change learners inherit the earth".

So, the first step is education.

There is no second-step by design, and since we are advocating a natural system, and with the right mindsets, decision will be released from the strong grips of structural organization and lost forever to the crowd. There will no power that is strong enough then to bring it back to the weaker centralized system.

Those who resist (the learned, who will be beautifully-equipped for the old world) will either go extinct or will accept change as the fifth stage of grief.

Credits

The Internet, the crowd for powerfully demonstrating their intelligence loud enough for us to know, and the great human thinkers of all past time who have always pushed things forward.

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June 10, 2011 at 3:54pm

Nader Alosaimi

Good post!

Everything is changing so quickly. It is time to unleash the power of "Emergent Collaboration" ! which , in turns, will shape your strategy and "national , if ever" competitive advantage (That have always been set beforehand by the so-called senior executives "quite often by titles").

Products Innovation , Strategy Innovation, Operation Innovation/Operational Excellence is working great but "Temporarily"! We need to rethink .. we need to use steve jobs' famous slogan : "Think different" but in a larger scale & resourced-based view of strategic management.

June 11, 2011 at 2:36am

Bruce Lewin

Interesting... challenging too :-) I wrote a little follow up with some other examples...

http://6boxmodel.com/blog/examples-of-crowdsourcing/

July 18, 2011 at 11:02am

Jon Ingham

if I understand this hack correctly, it's really about forming network organisations in which each node will have its own values and culture. My worry about this approach is whether it would ever be as effective as either 1. a true crowd sourcing model where work is sourced beyond the organisation, or 2. an insourced model where organisational co-operation is provided by a common set of value across the organisation (ie simply improving the way most organisations work today). I'm not saying it can't be, but those are my concerns.

October 13, 2011 at 10:11am

Thomas Simon

I am totally into what you are suggesting. Have been working on this problem for over 13 years. See www.myioffice.net - go to About Us => Developers - one of my key developers is in Jordan. Let's connect. simon@myioffice.net.