The idea is that you give employees as much freedom as you can while still maintaining enough central services to keep the employees in close communication and coordination with one another.

Ironically, as an IT professional, I’ve discussed this idea with a few companies where I’ve worked and all have rejected the idea as impossible. And I must admit in several instances it wouldn’t have worked — mostly because the users simply weren’t proficient enough with computers to be able to support themselves. Centralized control and standardization will, in theory, turn the people into replaceable parts in the machine of the business.

In an industrial model, this makes tons of sense. But as business generally becomes more chaotic in shape and function, the industrial assembly line model makes much less sense. Companies should train up the trainable and then hire the best self-sufficient, yet collaborative, people they can. Protect core assets, of course, but then let these smart, creative employees loose with their own computers and very little top-down control.

With firewalls as they are, IT depts, Clunky Win Machines etc inside and this open cloud world of iPads etc outside

What a contrast