Creating Entrepreneurial Structures

Abstract

Markets can no longer be secured through domination — they can only be continuously re-created through the distinctive satisfaction of fleeting customer needs. Any organization that is limited to less than the best, and to less of the best than is needed to bring distinctive satisfaction to each unique customer, is no longer in the position to transport itself beyond the boundaries of yesterday’s fast-receding markets. As intangible assets such as customer orientation, knowledge, adaptability and innovativeness are coming to the fore in the quest for a sustainable presence in the scheme of things, future-creating dynamic behaviours are becoming more important than the past-preserving static positions and structures of the past. As organizations are required to continually transform what they do and how they do it, massiveness, a limited repertoire and a fascination with form and structure — once the stuff of substance — are increasingly being seen as the stuff of nonsense. As companies seek to develop the mobile and versatile capabilities required to thrive in the turbulent nineties, they are required to reduce their mass and inertia. To do so, they are throwing out yesterday’s structures, configurations and relationships to be sure they have the ability to continually bring distinctions to their customers.

‘A bureaucracy can be defined as a business that exists to carry out an organization.’ (Stanley M. Davis)