Evolution of the Platform Organization: 2 The Era of Networks

Before diving into Haier and Zhang Ruimin’s RenDanHeYi vision, I’d like to examine a few network era experiments in rethinking organizational dynamics. I’ve selected a few well-publicized (if not actually well-understood) approaches, such as

• Frederic Laloux’s ‘level of consciousness’ ideas (as in Reinventing Organizations),
• the cybernetics-inspired ‘self-management’ bureaucracy of Holacracy, and
• the most promising and most widely adopted network era approach, the ‘team of teams’ model, where the traditional hierarchical model is displaced by a network of networks that emphasizes ‘decentralized autonomy, meritocracy, and a sense of partnership’1. This approach has been adopted in a broad range of contexts, like the non-profit Ashoka, General Stanley McChrystal’s response to asymmetrical warfare in Iraq, and scaling of agile organizations like Bosch, Amazon, Netflix, and USAA.

The emphases of these approaches are quite dissimilar, as we will see in the sections below.