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Competing in a Flat World is a brilliant achievement, making a significant contribution to our understanding of how to build an enterprise for what is rapidly becoming “a borderless world.” For me, some of the most valuable material in this book focuses on what the authors characterize as “network orchestration.” What’s involved? Here are a few brief excerpts from the first chapter: “The network orchestrator designs the overall supply chain, drawing together multiple factories in different regions to collaborate on a single product. Without orchestration, many of the gains of networks and global collaboration are lost because of the resulting supply chains are suboptimized. What the discipline of management was to the old vertically integrated, hierarchical firm, network orchestration is to the company working in the flat world. It is an essential capability for this world, from orchestrating virtual networks such as Wikipedia and open source software to delivering hard goods through global manufacturing.”

The authors then explain the three roles of the network orchestrator:

• First, she or he must “shift from viewing the [given organization] as the center of the universe to looking at the network. Companies don’t compete against other companies. Networks compete against networks.”
• Second, in a world in which orchestrators do not own the means of production, “they need a different kind of leadership and control. A dispersed global network can devolve into chaos. Therefore, network orchestrators rely on incentives and rewards “but also upon a combination of empowerment and trust, as well as training and certification, to manage the network that it does not own.”
• Third and finally, orchestrators have a different way of creating value. They create it “from integration, bridging borders as well as leveraging the company’s value and intellectual property across the network. This integration also means spanning borders between functions within the company, such as looking to manufacturing in developing markets to identify new opportunities for marketing and sales.”

 

Robert Morris

Robert Morris is an independent management consultant based in Dallas and among highest-ranked reviewers of business books for the US and UK Web sites of both Amazon and Borders. His published interviews of knowledge leaders include those of Joel Barker, Warren Bennis, Marcus Buckingham, Henry Chesbrough, Jim Collins, Thomas Davenport, Bill George, Michael Hammer, Tom Kelley, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Geoffrey Moore, Michael Ray, and Chris Zook.