The Distributed Organization

Business organizations are changing the way their workforces interact. Workers are starting to work in the cloud using all the new information technologies available nowadays. The way people are working creates a good opportunity for companies to reorganize their operations and cut their costs. Understanding the distributed organization is crucial to compete.

The size of a company is something that will be redefined in the following years. A company with 10 full-time workers can have a distributed organization of hundreds of part-time contributors. Freelancers play an important role in the digital economy, providing companies the outsourcing and crowdsourcing they need to achieve their goals. Companies that understand this huge opportunity and are able to reinvent the way they work will benefit from this new reality.

This new conception of how organizations can be structured pushes companies to stay small, instead of trying to get bigger. Managers need a new vision of their company's structures: forget departments and embrace teams. Teams can be reduced, added to, complemented, separated, giving the organization the rhythm it needs to compete in a global market. Teams can work from outside the company and be distributed all over the world. Everything is management, and managers need to understand the potential behind the distributed organization paradigm.

The picture is from the Automattic (Wordpress) offices in SFO.

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