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Which they possibly were. Companies are most commonly formed on divisive lines which entrench the status quo. Bureaucracies serve hierarchies of power. Where the matrix rules, item, geography and function have hardened into strong and separate baronies. The organization may be decentralised into strategic management units': under that or any other name, these profit centres are walled off from what must be corporate partners.
Extremely couple of companies are truly entrepreneurial, with flat structures and a pro-risk culture, and even fewer are really people-based, giving the employees ownership of their jobs and full responsibility for execution. Yet this will be the wave of the future, and the reason why the role of teams in management is clearly and strongly rising in significance. The significance of the NewCos is waxing though that of the CoreCo is waning. And NewCos are the natural ground for team working, which expresses the positive aspects of human nature in groups.
Benign human nature, economic trends, key management principles and technological change all point inside the direction of much more and better teams. Man can be a gregarious animal to whom group loyalties are very potent - witness the devotion in all social and economic classes to football clubs with which the fan might have no link other than his loyalty and whose teams are largely composed of multinational mercenaries who have no loyalties themselves.
LOYALTY DRIVE
Harness the loyalty drive of its members to any firm team, and you maximise the benefit from their collective power. You need that power to exploit the new opportunities which ought to be taken at a time when core activities are being commoditised, outsourced, pooled, etc.
Even if they remain cash cows, the milk is less wealthy; and bovine businesses are no match for rising stars. The latter's rise, however, is going to be slowed and even frustrated unless entrusted to really independent teams.
The difficulties reported in the HBR write-up explored above regularly hinge on misplaced efforts to restrain the NewCo's freedom of choice and action. At Corning a brand new venture in micro arrays for handling DNA samples had a rough passage for two years: All of CMT's troubles', the authors comment, were most likely inevitable from the moment CMT adopted Corning's organisational design.' At New York Times, success on the net only followed when company leaders carefully monitored interactions with the newspaper' - basically to stop the latter from strangling the infant in its crib.
It makes no difference no matter if a team is building a lasting new entity (as in the above instances); tackling a major issue that's intended to cease (like putting two businesses together following a merger); combining back offices of separate businesses in an outsourcing move; or running a drive to boost production quality.
In any operation, the likely ideal approach would be to develop units around a discrete activity and then divide the overall project into the most efficiently manageable sub-units, teams in their own rights and themselves managed on the exact same principles of delegation and autonomy. Its leader is, or needs to be, primus inter pares, a first amongst equals; not the typical CEO, who is primus - and never mind about the equality.
Another article within the HBR identifies seven varieties of leadership, only one of which mentions teams.
