The Organization through World War II was characterized by a number of now obsolete characteristics:
 

• Gender segregation
• No minorities
• Workforce would tend not to be very old due to average life-expectancies
• Businesses dealing with localized, discontinuous markets within a town and state
• Transportation modes limited
• Decision lead time limited by a host of factors such as limited communication technologies, limited education of general   workforce, and above transportation infrastructure.
• Working enviornments reflcted the times. Large numbers of people worked in open spaces cramped next to each other for cost savings and to facilitate communications due to low technologies

Organizations today have:
 

• A flatter structure to promote better communication, creativity, and efficiency.

• A workforce spanning a far greater range of ages
• Become far more national and international in their market penetrations.
• A wider variety of transportation modalities available, which facilitates market expansion.

An example of the hysical manifestations of new organizational models can be found in the new

Alcoa Headquarters

Building organization is straightforward, utilitarian, and clearly expressed:
 

Dreaming Forward?

"I never predict. I just look out the window and see what's visible—but not yet seen."
 
"The best way to predict the future is to create it."

"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It is to act with yesterday's logic."

   "What underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works."
 --Peter Drucker, The Digital Drucker
 
 

Rapid and extensive use of communications technology is possibly causing a drastic reduction in needed face-to-face contact that can only take place in well-planned workplaces.

"All their communication is by memo, e-mail, or voice-mail, which they exchange often, but they almost never meet... ...they need to experience, what I call the human moment: an authentic, pyschological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space. I have given the human moment a name because it has started to disappear from modern life and I sense that we all may be about to discover the destructive power of its absence.

"The human moment has two prerequisites: people's physical presence, and their emotional and intellectual attention... ...as Ray, a senior systems manager in a large investment company told me: 'I don't talk to people as much as I used to, and sometimes the results are very damaging... ...I've found that you can stumble into giant misunderstandings with e-mail. People's feelings can get hurt, and wrong information can get picked up.

"People need human contact in order to survive, they need it to maintain their mental acuity and their emotional well-being... ...The human moment then, is a regulator: when you take it away, people's primitive instincts can get the better of them. Just as in the anonymity of an automobile where stable people can behave like crazed maniacs, so too, on a keyboard, curteous people can become rude and abrupt."
 
            --Edward M. Hallowell,
               The Human Moment
              February 1999 Harvard Business Review--Article Summary

Organizational Ecology:

Organizational Ecology "...means looking at organizations in terms of how work and workers are convened in space and time, and     how those kinds of decisions both affect and are affected by decisions about the nature of information technology, the design work processes, human resource policies, and ultimately the organization’s philosophy and values."
    --Workplace by Design, Becker, Steele .

What is the toll of constant uncertainty on workers?

     (it is easy to get swept away in the amphetamine rush of constantly changing goals, but it is just as easy to be swept
     under the rug and rendered obsolete. The new workplace will create a shadow economy of marginalized workers) 

Industrial Ecology:

Industry is another type of workplace that has undergone enormous technological changes in the last twenty years. While most of these changes were at the level of an individual enterprise, a parallel technological development is emerging in various parts of the world. The newest frontier in industrial organization treats not only an individual enterprise as an organism, but rather a whole collection of industries as an eco-system. This is known as industrial ecology.
 
"Briefly, industrial ecology is an interdisciplinary framework for designing and operating industrial systems as living
systems that are interdependent with natural systems. We view public and private services, urban design, and
agriculture as fields that can benefit from IE.  Industrial ecology's primary goal is to balance environmental and
economic interests within emerging understanding of local and global ecological constraints. To achieve this goal
industrial ecologists must also coordinate with the social dimension of sustainable development."

    --Industrial Ecology in Kalundborg
 
The Spontaneous Evolution of Industrial Symbiosis at Kalundborg, Denmark

Kalundborg exhibits the characteristics of a simple food web: organisms consume each other's waste materials and energy, thereby becoming
interdependent with each other:
 

• Web of materials and energy exchanges among companies (and with the community)
• Developed over the last 20 years in a small industrial zone
• Motivation behind most of the was to reduce costs
• Managers and town residents realized they were generating environmental benefits
• Spontaneous generation of bilateral exchanges
• Efficient, multi-directional energy flows
• Web of recycling and reuse generates new revenues and cost savings

The Kalundborg Network

The following diagram illustrates the network of companies in the symbiosis, showing the extent of the material and
energy exchanges 1995, currently about 3 million tons per year.
 

 

Materials Flows--Additional Participants
 
 

Fish Farm	Cement Company	Refinery	Farmers
Sludge from Novo Nordisk's processes and from the fish farm's water treatment plant is used as fertilizer on nearby farm.Exchange totals over 1 million tons per year.	Cement company uses power plant's desulfurized fly ash to make calcium sulfate (gypsum), which it sells to Gyproc, supplying 2/3 of the  latter's needs.	Refinery's desulfurization operation produces pure liquid sulfur, which is trucked to Kemira, a sulfuric acid producer.	Surplus yeast from insulin production at Novo Nordisk goes to farmers as pig food

 

Lessons from Kalundborg

•      Industries must be different and yet must fit each other.
•      Arrangements must be commercially sound and profitable.
•      Development must be voluntary, in close collaboration with regulatory agencies.
•      A short physical distance between the partners is necessary for economy of transportation (with heat and some materials).
•      At Kalundborg, the managers at different plants all know each other.

Organizations will have to learn to think in ecological terms in order to live, thrive, and survive. command and Control models have been and will continue to be supplanted by symbiosis and shifting team based structures.

Bibliography embedded in body of text.

Frost Travis and Steve Smith
Idea book 1, 2/19/99