Organizational Renewal- Tearing Down the Functional Silos AME Study Group on Functional Organization

Some say that the typical U.S. corporation never was competitive. Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, says that All)erican dominance of the world's markets during the three decades following WWII was nothing to brag about. He points out that Americans actually dominated through default. There was no real competition as we know it today, and consequently U.S. companies grew fat, happy, and complacent. We thus felt little pain and little compelling need for significant change. In all too many cases, the organizational problems are still there -still weakening a company's ability to become a world-class competitor. In the February 15, 1988 issue of Fortune, Ross Perot stated his perspective of GM's current organizational problems and what he would do to overcome them. He painted GM as a classic victim of its long-standing bureaucracy. Companies restless about their form of organization are increasingly doing something about it. IBM is reorganizing to take "Big Blue" closer to the customer and to cut product introduction times. Digital Equipment CEO Ken Olson visualizes leaVing the environment of management command and control for one of organizational networking. Motorola refers to managing the white spaces in the organization chart. The common factor in these and many other companies is combating "the func-