Net-centric companies spend a lot of time preaching to employees about goals -- and relatively little time telling them how to achieve those goals. That finding comes from a study by Lynne Waldera, president and CEO of InMomentum Inc. Waldera spent a year exploring the connection between culture and performance at 15 companies, including Cisco. "Internet companies build a sense of collective ownership," she says. "In these environments, we found what we call 'big jobs' -- expansive jobs that don't have a lot of role clarity."
Waldera points to a conversation that she had with a new Cisco employee. "I asked him, 'With all of the craziness that you have going on, how do you know what you're supposed to be doing?' He turned over his badge, and on the other side were the five strategic initiatives that John Chambers has laid out. This employee recited those initiatives and said, 'That's pretty much my job -- to make those goals a reality. It's up to me to figure out how to do that.' "
At Microsoft, "program managers" are responsible for overseeing the development of a particular product -- yet none of the developers or designers who work on that product actually report to them. So they must hone the skill of artful persuasion. "I started out as a program manager," says Michael Angiulo. "For my first job out of college, my business card said 'manager' -- which I thought was really cool. My parents were like, 'Who do you manage?' And I said, 'Hmm. I think just myself.' Some of the people I worked with were more high-level than me, and it was my job to get them to buy in on product features and ideas."
For a Net-centric company, all other questions ultimately lead to that one. A company that has made the Net second nature harnesses all of its resources to ensure that it won't be caught flat-footed when changes loom. As a matter of course, it scans the digital horizon for trends and opportunities -- for shortcuts to the future. It uses technology to build change into its everyday operations.
Consider Intel, which has created a special unit within its IT department for the sole purpose of implementing ideas in next-to-real time. This 400-person team, called IT Flex Services, ignores the standard budget cycle and focuses on getting good ideas off the ground fast. One recent accomplishment of the team was to set up a system that allows any employee who joins Intel through a merger to access the company's secure Intranet the day the deal is finalized. The same system allows employees to access benefits information and company data from any Web-connected PC.
"We've just begun to understand the value of having all of this technology -- as well as a culture that understands how to exploit it," says Douglas Busch, 48, vice president and director of information technology at Intel. "The culture that we've built pushes us. Employees don't want to work at a company that takes five years to change its mind on something. They want to work at a company that's responsive to their ideas, where they can come up with something great and see it actually get acted on."
Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Visit Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com), Intel (www.intel.com), and Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) on the Web.
Net-centric companies have a simple focus on flexibility -- on adjusting nimbly to fast-changing circumstances. But for a company as big as Microsoft, staying flexible is anything but simple. So the software giant relies on scenario planning to remain strategically limber.
Last year, for example, the Microsoft Office group ran an experiment that was patterned in a tongue-in-cheek fashion after the TV show Survivor. The impetus behind this scenario was the company's .Net initiative -- a move to shift the platform of Microsoft products from the Windows operating system to the Internet.
In the experiment, Office program managers and planners divided themselves into three "tribes," and members of each tribe had to live for a week with certain restrictions on their digital work habits. One tribe wasn't allowed to save files on a PC; another tribe wasn't allowed to launch Office products at all. How hard was it to "survive" those conditions? Just consider the names that the group chose for the three tribes: Mucky, Sucky, and Yucky.
"It was a fun little game to play," says Michael Angiulo, group product planner for the Office group. "We learned a lot about how changing the rules affects productivity." And yes, along the way, the group also learned to give careful consideration to each possible change before declaring it "off the island."
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