On the flip side, the increasing ubiquity of real-time global communication has made corporate reputation a vital but fragile commodity. The room for error, scandal or ethical shortcomings is virtually nonexistent once a story has arrived on the global media radar. As with militaries or heads of government, corporations have only a few hours, perhaps minutes to react to an emerging story in a way the global audience will consider credible, sufficient and responsible. It is here that a resilient structure is required, specifically, as Steve wrote:

“…the essence of a Resilient Enterprise — freer linkages, richer exchanges, greater feedback loops, and improved environment for sharing and innovating.”

This kind of a structure is an advantage in two ways to a corporation facing a crisis. First, the freer flow of information from the outside, closer to real-time, simultaneously throughout the organization reduces the distortion of stovepiping and groupthink and prevents many problems from arising in the first place. Secondly, there is an acceleration of organizational response time, particularly where pro-active, autonomous, decision-making is part of the institutional culture.

It is important to point out that ” Multinationals 2.0″ represents a model far more than a reality but it is a model that the economic conditions of globalization would tend to reward. Multinationals 2.0 would also be a structure and a culture that would be easier to build from the ground up than try to retro-engineer into a venerable corporate giant like IBM with a longstanding institutional habits of mind ( Palmisano gets all the more credit for moving in this direction instead of taking the easier, short-term path of most CEO’s) .It will be interesting to see how foreign multinational models like the Japanese Kereitsus, Korean Chaebols or European conglomerates with strong state and union corporate governance, choose to engage this concept or if they will try an alternative strategy to build resiliency.

Links:

Dr. Barnett

Dan of tdaxp

Page 2 of 2 | Previous page