The Hindu Business Line : From pyramid to pizza

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?" — Nelson Mandela

The Pyramid is a colossal structure that provokes awe. From Pharaoh to President, it has come to symbolise authority, power, distance, ambition, intelligence and hierarchy.

In the context of an organisation, as the structure converges into a single point at the top, growth opportunities get restricted towards the top. The number of people at a particular level is limited and well defined. Also, there are fewer people at every level above. At all levels, therefore, there is considerable professional and egotistic competition..

Since the pyramid structure limits vertical growth, competencies differ at various points on the steep sides. The leader sits right on top, smug but lonely. His success is in not falling off even while trying to make the pyramid taller, or building more such structures.

Every perestroika begins with the toppling of a hallowed structure. Organisationally, what better than toppling the venerable pyramid? But when you demolish an edifice, you need to put something new in its place.

How about the pizza?

Organisational revolution is in progress. Like the Berlin Wall, cabin walls are crumbling. Functional boundaries are evaporating. Work is no longer organised by departments but project teams with membership based on competence and interest. All employees, including the boss, need to work on multiple projects, with at least one in there are of core competence and one in which they feel they can add value based on their other interests. Such a team-based organisational structure can be depicted in the shape of a pizza.

The different business organisations are the "pepperonis" on the pizza, with the administrative function matrixes across various business units.

In such flat, fluid structures, it is not unfair to ask, "What holds it all together?" If there is so little hierarchy, and no central or top-down control, how does the organisation move cohesively in the right direction? In other words, where is the cheese?

Like a genetic code, shared values become the shaper of organisational and individual behaviour. Leadership is no longer positional; it is expected of everyone, and the followers define a natural leader.

A good analogy is a flock of geese; each goose is responsible for getting itself to the flock's destination. When the lead goose gets tired, another moves in to take its place, assuring a steady pace.

Leadership is transitory; revolving in responsibility with high altitude accountability.

Traditional frameworks are crumbling and coalescing into nascent, learning and evolving forms. And so is leadership.

A fascinating example is the `Enterprise' that has metamorphosed into the `Extraprise'. A glorious vindication of Handy's prediction of an `Inverted Doughnut Model' in which the external rather than the internal environment constitutes the organisational core. The burgeoning businesses of call centres, BPOs and KPOs testify to this new way of working.

MNCs, once the pride of the business world, are transmogrifying into a new organisational form: The Metanationals, that extract knowledge from a boundary-less world, plug it into a hypernetwork and generate value.

The new Leader?

Programmers using open code source software such as Linux can combine available components differently to create different distributions such as Caldera, Corel and Debian, based on the same foundation — the Linux kernel. However, any changes to these foundations must be made available to all, a unifying force between the Linux distributions at their foundation governed by a `Copyleft type Licensing'. You can go to any destination but it must be shared with others who wish to take the same road! What will be the leadership mandate in such a situation where both resources and destination becomes common property? If resources and results cannot be differentiated, what then will be the leadership approach in setting up a strategic framework for the organisation?

Managers lead within a paradigm; but leaders manage between paradigms.

As organisation structures flatten out from pyramids to pizzas, the operating principle is `width' and not `height'. Hierarchies need to be redefined from levels to clusters. The key leadership challenge will be to view each interaction as an opportunity to relate, win support, build rapport and influence. If each individual in the organisation network is viewed as a single strand, the leader will have to pick up as many strands as possible and weave them into a fabric that is durable, resilient and valuable.

Enhanced connectedness and relatedness in a virtual world will help the neo-leader create a closer to life kind of reality. The neo-leader will encourage, enable and empower patterns of connection and disconnection among members to explore the infinite possibilities that may come out of such relationships and seize value adding outcomes.

Facilitating discovery

This will come from making people work in new ways both within and between groups and the organisation's business ecosystem. This facilitates `discovery' of `self' and `others' which becomes the glue to strengthen network relationships. Leadership ultimately will be manifest as a creative, permeating energy, making its influence and impact felt across the organisation.

The neo-leader will have to operate with a duality mindset to fuel the organisational engine. Synchronising logic and intuition; sensing and feeling; steering and free-wheeling; moving forward with eyes closed but with an open mind, having the attitude of servitude and yet remain fiercely independent — characteristics which will set the leader apart from the crowd.

This is the point of inflection where leadership will transit to leadershift. This change will occur in the deep recesses of the mind of the leader. He will first need to connect with his inner being, recalibrate his value system, reconstruct his ego and only then awaken to his environment.

To achieve this connection, the leader will have to let go; to configure, the leader cannot choose his own design but allow it to evolve; to convince, the leader must be willing to demolish his hallowed edifices; and to create, like the legendary phoenix he may have to `give his life' as a ransom, so that others may live!

(The writer is Vice-President, Henkel India Ltd)