21st century organisation

Is the
20th Century
organisation
history?
For anyone who has read Thomas L. Friedman’s The Earth is
Flat, the answer to this question is a resounding “yes” –
which only serves to raise some questions about the likely
structure of the 21st Century organisation. IBM Australia
and New Zealand Chief Executive Glen Boreham recently
outlined his thoughts about what the future holds.

38 Australian Industry Group Winter 2007


M
ulti-nationals, the classic 20th Century
organisation, are on the way out. In
fact, businesses that adhere to an
“organisational” type structure are on the way out.
According to IBM Australia Chief Executive
Glen Boreham, who will address Ai Group’s
National Forum in August, the 21st Century
enterprise will think of itself as a network that will
bring people together from all over the world on a
project-by-project basis.
And when that particular business goal has
been achieved, the network of people will disband
and form different teams.
Individuals will have great flexibility over how
and where they work in this business environment
and the companies that operate in this model will
be more competitive because they have access to
skills, knowledge, insight and innovation from
around the world.
“It has substantial advantages … because
these companies will have the flexibility and
responsiveness to capture value within the globally
integrated economy – not just their local market,”
Mr Boreham told the National Press Club in
Canberra recently.
“This type of opportunity and pressure will
force companies to focus on the ways they can be
truly different.”
Under this model, which has stemmed from an
innovation outlook that IBM conducts with other
large companies, academics, the public sector,
and community groups, enterprises will win by
understanding how they can add customer value
and how to assemble a network of suppliers from
around the world to deliver that value.
In such a business environment, Australia’s
success relies not on lowering cost, but on
capitalising from its strengths in innovation,
creativity, thought leadership and integrity.
Integrity is particularly important because the
global economy will falter if partners and suppliers
fail to deliver on their promises, Mr Boreham said.
He said the traditional corporate hierarchy
where central management decides what to do has
no place under this business model. Instead, the
enterprise will operate on a distributed intelligence
basis where leadership is derived from a common,
unifying set of ideas or rules.
“This goes beyond core and non-core functions
and it requires a completely different approach to
management because all of a sudden you’re trying
to manage a complex and ever changing network of
individuals – many of them not your direct reports or
even employees of your company,” Mr Boreham said.
“In that situation, command and control doesn’t
work. You need individuals to self-regulate – to be
responsive and efficient.”
The key to ensuring this occurred is providing
the network with a common purpose – they need a
vision and a common set of values that have been
developed and agreed on by the network itself.
“This vision is what we believe will provide
the necessary glue between individuals and
organisations. These values will regulate their
actions,” he said.
But Mr Boreham warned that Australia
faces some major barriers in its efforts to take
advantage of such a global business environment.
These include inadequate information and
communications technology (ICT) infrastructure
and an education system not geared towards
producing the world’s best equipped talent pool.
“We need to invest in infrastructure that enables
a fluid and mobile workforce,” he said.
But he said inadequacies in Australia’s ICT
infrastructure are not receiving the same attention as
the problems of water and transport infrastructure.
“We haven’t had the same sense of urgency, but
we should – because ICT infrastructure allows
global work to flow to people in our cities and
regional and rural Australia,” he said.
This has its own separate advantages, he said.
“If an increasingly mobile workforce doesn’t have
to commute – if they can work from home or from a
local office – imagine the cut to our fuel emissions,
how it might improve our local communities, and
the impact it could have on families,” he said.
Turning to education, he said, Australia needs
to develop flexible individuals who not only
have technical skills, but also possess business
understanding and the ability to adapt and operate
in different cultures.
“Although our education system has historically
served Australia very well, I’m deeply concerned
that it’s not going to meet the rapidly changing
needs of our future,” he said.
“Our education disciplines, while very high
quality, still too often exist in silos – so we produce
terrific engineers but we don’t produce engineers
who understand how to manage projects in India.
Technology to flatten last remaining boundaries
Technology such as real-time translation is
breaking down the last remaining barriers
to the new model of global enterprise, IBM
Australia and New Zealand Chief Executive
Glen Boreham said.
Mr Boreham said he expects real-time
translation technologies to soon be embedded
into mobile phones, laptops and cars, allowing
individuals to talk to anyone in the world in
their own language.
In Japan, real-time translation technology
will already allow a PDA to translate a menu
into English.
21st century organisation
“We need our entire
education system
– from kindergarten
through to post-
graduate – to prepare
our workforce
with qualifications
that fuse technical
skills with industry
knowledge and
cultural awareness.”
“And that means transforming how we build
our pipeline of future talent.”
Mr Boreham said universities need to start
working with thought leaders in the business world
to make this happen.
As an example, IBM has an undergraduate
program with Victoria’s University of Ballarat,
where students work at IBM and IBM experts teach
at the university. As a result, IBM employs over 600
people in that regional centre that could have been
located anywhere in Asia-Pacific.
“It was located in Ballarat because we had a
partnership with the university that ensured a
pipeline of talent to staff that centre,” he said.
In recent years, skills and university partnerships
have been the major reason for every global centre
that IBM has chosen to locate in Australia.
“There’s nothing we can do to stop low value
work moving out of Australia,” he said.
“However, it is our job – in business and in
government – to make sure high value work flows
in to replace it.”
“As a business leader, I find the implications
of this astounding,” Mr Boreham told the
National Press Club in Canberra recently.
“Because while we talk about the world
being flat, the reality is that language
and cultural differences have kept some
unnecessary boundaries alive.
“Technologies like this, which lower the
barriers to communication, will further the
rise of collaborative communities, where the
creative energy of thousands, even millions,
of people is coordinated by a network – not
by a single organisation,” he said.
Australian Industry Group Winter 2007 39
21st century organisation

60 countries via the Madrid Protocol, an another

Dinosaurs
important international treaty with equivalent
treaties for patents and design. Regardless of the
treaty your trade mark must still be examined, filed
and granted registration in each individual country

stick out
by that country’s IP office.
And worse still these IP protection systems are
run by burgeoning bureaucracies that resemble
dinosaurs with Byzantine processes that can take

in a flat world
years to grant or deny your rights. Who has time in
a flat world to wait for anyone or anything, much
less government officials?
Australia boasts a highly efficient intellectual
property office, IP Australia, and yet it still takes at
least seven-and-a-half months for a trade mark to
Collaboration between a network of individuals be granted as the office must wait for trade marks
filed from Madrid Protocol member countries to
from around the world raises questions when it comes to reach our shores. In the US, the wait for trade mark
protecting an enterprise’s intellectual property. registration can be around two years.
Sending in your intellectual property first, then
For example, where do the IP borders lie in what is sorting out your IP rights is like putting the cart
essentially a borderless world? Here, IP Wealth Pty Ltd before the horse. The risk in trading across national
boundaries without bedded down rights, like trade
Chief IP Strategist Alicia Beverley* outlines the 21st Century marks and patents, can be huge. This is especially
considerations when it comes to protecting your IP. true given that in most dynamic, sophisticated
marketplaces it is very possible you have not re-
invented the wheel. Your new product or service
trade mark might just be stepping on local toes.

G
ive me a successful, dynamic business and
I’ll show you an enterprise bursting with
intellectual property assets and tapped
and often untapped value. What I also know about
a successful business is that in today’s “flat world”,
the potential for collaboration of every type in every
direction – supply, export, alliances, partnerships,
memberships, research – is unlimited.
Then there is the sheer speed to market and
numbers of markets that can be reached far more
easily than in past years.
Today, we don’t blink an eye if an Australian
business is supplied by a Chinese manufacturer,
sells to South Africa, the US and Europe, offers a
help line supplied by an Indian call centre, and has
research partners in Germany.
In this environment, everything from pure
digital content like royalty free photos and political
blogs to tangible products and services like mining
equipment and engineering services can be
exported across national boundaries in a kind of
free flow. These swift currents have given Australian
businesses unprecedented opportunities.
Export in the flat world is not yet as simple
as banging a world map on the wall and arming
yourself with a thousand brightly coloured tacks,
but Thomas L. Friedman’s bestselling book The
Earth is Flat makes this feel very close.
The valuable intellectual property assets that
are the net results of this intense activity can be
protected by a variety of intellectual property
rights – trade mark registrations, copyright,
patent protection, design registration and plant In Mexico, infringing a registered trade mark
breeders rights. The purpose of accruing these can result in jail time. I guarantee you that all
rights is to provide your business with a cutting Mexican jails are ½ star accommodation at the best
edge monopoly and the right to stop unauthorised of times.
parties from exploiting your IP. So what to do when your capitalist urges tell you
But there’s a problem: intellectual property to sell, sell, sell and yet your IP advisers are telling
rights are NOT portable. you to wait, wait, wait?
The answer is to conduct your searches and make
Copyright is an applications to protect your intellectual property as
early as possible. And I mean early. If you’re asking
exception because it for seed funding and thinking big – then think big
is an automatic, self- protection measures across as many overseas markets
as possible. If you’re asking for government funding
assigned right that is – and some government grants include money for
relatively universal in IP – then ask for your IP professional for an accurate
costing in ALL of the markets you want to sell in.
those countries that If you’re considering taking on an equity partner to
help fund growth – then fund IP protection too. If
are signatories to you’re thinking of increasing your debt to pay for
the Berne Convention, expansion – then think IP protection.
Too often intellectual property protection is
but trade marks, a last item on the list or not on the list at all. The
patents, designs, result is often horror stories of overseas litigation,
suppliers who have snaffled IP rights, and so on.
plant breeder’s rights Remember what our grandmothers told us – it
was true in a round earth and it’s true in a flat one
have to be accrued
– an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
country by country. * IP Wealth Pty Ltd is a specialist intellectual
property and trade mark consultancy. To date,
For instance, being granted a trade mark registration Chief IP Strategist Alicia Beverley has trained over
in Australia protects your brand here and gives 1,000 CEOs in intellectual property – more than any
you an option to take up protection in more than institution or individual in Australia.

40 Australian Industry Group Winter 2007