The Individualized Corporation

Abstract

The authors, based on their extensive research and consulting experience, have attempted to create a new perspective of the 21 century organisation, in this book. With Taylor’s prescription of job analysis and redefinition, management emerged as a tool in motivating and controlling workmen in their well-defined jobs. Capital was the most critical and scarcest of resources in the industrial era; as a result management implied resource allocation, capital budgeting, etc. The focus was on capital productivity, not on human aspects. Taylorism led to the concept of divisionalized structures; William Whyte’s book Organization Man represented the thinking of the time. This paradigm got entrenched, became robust and resistant to change, over a period. Towards the end of the 20 th century some dynamic managers, like Jack Welch of GE and Percy Barnevik of ABB, felt that managers spent too much time on capital productivity ignoring the human aspects. They explored and eventually succeeded: Instead of fitting people into the strategy-structure-systems paradigm can organisations be created to fit people? This is the genesis of the concept of Individualized Corporation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 276 citations exist upstream.