Leading on demand businesses - Executives as architects

IBM Systems Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 405-413

  Haeckel, S H ^a  

^a Adaptive Business Designs   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

QUALITY CONTROL; SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONS; STRATEGIC PLANNING; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS;

BUSINESS DESIGN; BUSINESS EXECUTIVES; SYSTEM KNOWLEDGE;

INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT;

EID: 0141906250     PISSN: 00188670     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1147/sj.423.0405     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. B. Olney, "Fast Feet, But Faulk Is an Even Quicker Thinker," New York Times (February 1, 2002).
2. R. A. Ackoff, The Democractic Corporation, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1994).
3. S. H. Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1999), p. 110.
4. R. Scarborough, "Command Center Not Ready For War, Air Force Reports," Washington Times (February 5, 2003), p. 3.
5. S. H. Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1999), pp. 142-147.
6. Readers are invited to supply examples from their own experience. How many managers have had responsibility for leading organizations comprised of heterogeneous groups put together in order to meet "span of control" standards? How many have participated in local best practices projects that ignored the implications on other parts of the business of the changes they were contemplating, because finding and assessing these impacts was too complicated?
7. "Top-down" design and "bottom-up" improvisation sound inconsistent, but in the sense-and respond model they are compatible. Since any system is designed by successive decomposition of its function into subsystems, it is top down. When the system goes into execution, improvisation and ad hoc behaviors produce learnings that are used to adapt the initial higher-level designs, a bottom-up process.
8. As early as 1963, the "Data Processing Manager" at Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters was exhorting his internal business customers to adopt "Standard Operating Procedures" (SOP) so that his programmers could write code that represented the way business was actually done. James Martin and others later formalized and extended SOP into a discipline that provides a way of describing business processes that is common to both business and IT professionals.
9. Many, but not all decisions on mergers and acquisitions are open to this critism. Those that are not include decisions that are part of a holding company's portfolio strategy, in which the motive is not synergy, but taking advantage of economies of scope.