This book – The Future Arrived Yesterday – by Michael S. Malone – is a proposal by the author (I keep writing doctor as I’m in the hospital and I’m tired when I writing this) on how to re-structure corporations to handle the changes in the future.  He proposes a new structure – the “Protean” corporation – as an organizational structure to better adapt to the changing conditions in the future.  A “Protean” corporation, according to the Michael S. Malone,  is a corporate structure that has a more “permanent” core along with a more nebulous “cloud” that serves that core.

The author’s premise is that the nature of the workforce and society is changing rapidly – due to a number of factors:

  1. The younger workforce is not interested in “permanent” employment – they’ve much more self-centered, many of their parents have worked from home and technology has changed permanently the way they interact with people (growing up with Facebook, Twitter from a young age?).  They are not likely to want a traditional full-time job nor expect that to be in their future.
  2. The world keeps changing faster and faster – and traditional corporations have a hard time adapting. To re-organize hundreds of full-time employees into new organizational structures can be very painful and expensive, much less time consuming.
  3. The world is becoming increasingly global -with new consumers coming on board every day across the whole world – in places many of us have never heard of.
  4. Therefore the complexity of relationships of the business environment in the world to come will be much more significant.

So the author makes the point that the traditional corporation isn’t flexible enough for the future – but a completely decentralized corporation isn’t good either -as it has no identify – no sense of who it is – which can lead to a lot of trouble. Therefore the author proposes that a new structure be created  - one with a core set of employees (full time with job security) that set the values of the organization – with another set of employees, contractors, vendors, etc. – that have less and less commitment to the organization.  This “cloud” is then the flexible and dynamic part of the organization – whereas the core is the stability.

The core is also a balance against the CEO – even though they can’t set business strategy themselves.  They can actually advise a new CEO against taking a path that would be folly given the corporate culture.  They also will help develop the tools to educate the “cloud” with the corporations values, standards, etc. – to avoid potential problems.  This also then makes the board of directors more important – as they become the arbiter between the CEO (business leadership) and the core (corporate continuity).

The author really doesn’t seem to be trying to promote this corporate structure for it’s own sake – but as a method of handling the changes in society and business that he feels are inevitable.  Interestingly enough the author also indicates that the federal government should consider re-organizing into something other than the monolithic organization that it is – the massive bureaucracy. Instead consider moving toward more of a “cloud” model itself – which is an interesting idea.

The overall writing of the book is good – but it wasn’t spectacular either.  I would recommend reading this book as food for thought – not as a blueprint for how to re-build a corporation.  I do think many corporations  need to start looking at themselves in terms of how they are organized – in order to adapt better for the future.  The economies of scale of old may not be as effective in the future as they are today – which are a specialization of many large corporations today.

One of the challenges for America will be the current coupling of health insurance and retirement with an employer.  If a larger percentage of employees are no longer full-time employees somehow these employees will need to obtain affordable health insurance and plan for retirement.  These may require some structural changes in how our society is organized – I’m just not sure how.  I sometimes wonder though if those items were taken out of the equation if more people would go work for themselves – if that is what is tying them to a full-time job.  It will also require Americans to get off their debt binge – as to work on a contract basis will require individuals to actually have savings – so they can go between contracts.

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