(slow upbeat music)
-: We've been talking about the bionic company.
Now we're going to go deep on organization structures
and the platform organization.
The basics of the new organization model
is a platform organization,
and it has as its components front-end agile teams
supported by modular, tech, and data infrastructure
and bionic processes.
Building and managing bionic processes
will require a fundamentally new way of working.
These processes are most rapidly built and innovated
by empowered teams with multi-disciplinary skills
that cover the functions, the data, technology, and design.
They have a product owner, a clear mission,
and work with an agile methodology.
In our experience,
we see that companies can typically identify
30 to 50 major units of work or bionic processes.
These can be customer-facing processes,
frontline support, operations,
or even back-office processes.
And in this model, process ownership shifts.
Bionic processes are no longer owned,
whether fully or partially, by the previous business units,
which makes them really different
from the shared services models of today.
Rather, they're built and managed by agile teams,
who have clear service levels and clear business missions.
Taken together, they form a platform
that supports the frontline,
operations teams, and customers.
Done right, the go-to-market and operations teams
are freed from much of their internal focus.
They could be even more intensely committed
to their core missions of sales,
marketing, service, or operations.
In the future, in a more modular economy,
bionic organization structures
will even extend beyond traditional employer walls.
Through ecosystems, companies will fill capability gaps
in order to access different types of talents.
They'll be able to provide specific bionic processes
in their platforms.
Think for example, Salesforce providing CRM
or Amazon providing AWS.
And you'll even have situations
in which workers work on top of the platform
without joining the company officially,
such as the case of Uber and Lyft drivers today.
Leading a bionic organization,
one built of modular, agile teams,
looks very different than leading a company today.
Leaders will no longer be thinking of themselves
as controllers of hardwired
organizational structures and processes.
Instead, they will be much more like jazz orchestrators
that are able to unleash employee's potential
through fluid governance and behavior-shaping practices.
At the top of the organization, this ends up looking
much more like what we see in Silicon Valley,
leaders play a venture capital-like role.
They understand key objectives,
they set up the modular and agile teams
with the necessary resources,
but they give them significant autonomy
to do what they think is in the best interests
of the business.
Then frankly, the job of the senior leaders
is to remove roadblocks and ensure that the teams
have the talent and capabilities to operate.
In this world, the concept of middle-management,
as we know it, really goes away.
At the lower-levels, leaders are player coaches
working in the trenches with the teams,
as they develop new products and services.
They lead with new routines,
like daily standups and retrospectives,
and they're ultimately accountable
for the results of their teams.
They're chapter leads
who focus on human capital recruitment,
development, deployment, and retention.
In the bionic company,
there is an increasing need for expert resources
to be deployed on cross-functional agile teams.
All leaders in this new model
will need to participate in what we call Nudges at Scale.
This is combining data, technology, and neuroscience
to help every employee reach their full potential
and to shape their behavior
in a more nuanced and targeted way than ever before.
With Nudges at Scale,
the possibilities to influence behavior are growing,
and leaders will spend an increasing portion of their time
focused on creating the context for employees
to be their most productive and to truly thrive.
The leadership model in the bionic company
represents a major shift from today
and one that I hope you will all engage in.