Abstract
The twenty-first-century organization is faced with the apparent dilemma of being efficient and innovative, lean and flexible, and hierarchical and flat. The seemingly contradictory characteristics extend into every organizational system, from culture and strategy to process and technology. The flexible organization must embrace and cultivate opposites; indeed, the organization should recognize opposites as opportunities for inventiveness and synthesis and not a dilemma that requires a choice between opposites (Takeuchi and Nonaka 2004). This is in contrast to a more traditional organization that either chooses one principle over its apparent opposite or adopts an engineering perspective that optimizes something between opposites. The knowledge organization, in contrast, synthesizes opposites into something unique and new.
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Notes
- 1.
In strict modeling terms, there is a difference between encapsulation and information hiding. The former represents the case where the contract is like a “glass box” – the inner workings are visible to a user – while the latter, the inner workings are not visible and may be thought of as a “black box.” In either case, the user can change neither the inner workings of the contract nor its signature – both (inner workings and signature) collectively represent the design rules necessary for the contract’s modularity.
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Morabito, J., Sack, I., Stohr, E., Bhate, A. (2014). Architecting Flexible Organizations. In: Sushil, Stohr, E.A. (eds) The Flexible Enterprise. Flexible Systems Management. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1560-8_7
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