My new book entitled The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration® is now available. It’s the second book in a series which includes The Culture of Collaboration®: Maximizing Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy. The Bounty Effect shows how to change the structure of organizations for collaboration.
Why do organizations need to change their structures? The Industrial Age was command and control. The Information Age is collaboration. Yet Industrial Age structures render collaboration dead on arrival in the Information Age. Remnants of these structures—including organization charts, performance reviews, meetings and mission statements—inhibit organizations from using new collaborative methods and tools that spark innovation. Now we’re at the point where many organizations—from corporations and small businesses to universities and government agencies—have a desire to collaborate. Some have taken action to instill collaborative culture. But what’s holding back collaboration is obsolete organizational structures, which we must change.
The Bounty Effect gets its name from the mutiny that occurred on the H.M.S Bounty in 1789. Before the mutiny, Captain William Bligh used a well-worn management technique: command-and-control. The mutiny forced the structure and culture to change as Bligh became a collaborative leader and his loyalists participated in decisions as they struggled for survival aboard a small boat. The mutiny was an exigent circumstance, one that compels immediate action.
The Bounty Effect happens when exigent circumstances compel businesses, governments and organizations to change their structures from command and control to collaborative. Triggers include disruptive market forces, new competitors, regional slowdowns, natural disasters, terrorist attacks and global downturns.
The book is about how to seize the opportunity that The Bounty Effect provides and change the organizational structure in seven steps. My objective in writing the book is to provide a framework for structural change necessary to transform organizations into collaborative enterprises. And The Bounty Effect demonstrates how collaborative enterprises create far more value than command-and-control organizations. Using the framework, people and organizations can determine how to redesign and adopt a collaborative structure that fits. I welcome your input.
