The Emerging Flexible Organization: Perspectives from Silicon Valley

Many enterprises, public and private alike, are in the midst of fundamental organizational changes. These cover a spectrum of initiatives—ranging from downsizing and delayering to the creation of team-based networks, partnerships, and alliances—and involve a fundamental reassessment of employment security, critical competencies, and career trajectories. Collectively, these trends highlight some of the limitations of our traditional approaches for managing continuous, rather than periodic, ransformations. High-technology firms in Silicon Valley are experimenting with flexible organizational building blocks, designed to address novel tasks, kaleidoscopic change, and continuous innovation. This article describes the building blocks of flexible organizational designs.