What Do New Ways of Organizing Look Like?

The design of a number of contemporary organizations is reviewed: Vinci, a French builder and operator of infrastructure; ING, a Dutch bank; Zappos, an American online retailer; Haier, a Chinese appliance maker; and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a firm bringing the hyperloop transportation system to market. Several common design elements are found in their way of organizing. The most striking commonality is that they all have a modular organization structure, with relatively small teams as the main building blocks. A second important common feature is that these teams are to a large extent self-governing. The third way in which their organization designs are alike is the presence and importance of common management processes, needed to hold the structure together in the absence of a traditional hierarchy. These processes have two important aims: to achieve coordinated action between the teams and to set organization-wide strategic goals. A final point of similarity is that all the organizations reviewed here accept a certain level of duplication of effort. Some of them have even actively resisted the tendency to pool resources, believing it will diminish the autonomy of their teams.