Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Globalization and Resilient Enterprises
The emerging business model of the 21st century is not, in fact, “multinational”. This new kind of organisation – at IBM we call it “the globally integrated enterprise” – is very different in its structure and operations. Many parties to the globalisation debate mistakenly project the twentieth-century multinational on to 21st century global reality. This happens as often among free-market advocates as among those opposed to globalisation.
Tom Barnett’s take on the same letter to the Times
Met a fascinating thinker a while back who noted that it took building architecture quite some time to adjust to the new capabilities forged by the advances in internal skeleton design that kicked off the era of skyscrapers. For centuries (thousands of years, really), architecture was limited by the reality of stacking blocks on top of one another, buttressing here and there, adding the arch, but overall, pretty limited, so buildings all looked basically the same.
Then came the capacity for internal skeletons made of metal, and yet, quite a few years pass before any new movement arises in architecture to account for this new capacity. Buildings were being built in largely the same way, just taller.
But eventually, architects break that mold and new buildings arise with the new building forms. But naturally, there was a lag, or a lack of imagination that had to be overcome.
This guy’s point was that the same was true for the rise of information technology: we had all this new capacity but kept using it in all the same old corporate structures. This was basically Art Cebrowski’s point about the military: “you’re still thinking largely in terms of platforms instead of the possible net.”