The Age Of Unreason by Charles Handy

Author:Charles Handy [Handy, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

6 The Triple I Organization

IT WAS WALLY Olins who summed it up for me. A large part of his work, and that of his successful company, involves helping organizations to discover and to express visually their strengths and their purposes. He is, therefore, in an excellent position to observe the way things are changing in organizations, and changing they are. ‘Wealth in the past,’ he observed, ‘used to be based on the ownership of land, then, more recently on the capacity to make things. Increasingly, today, it is based on knowledge and on the ability to use that knowledge.’

The new formula for success, and for effectiveness, is I3 = AV, where I stands for Intelligence, Information and Ideas, and AV means added value in cash or in kind. In a competitive information society brains on their own are not enough, they need good information to work with and ideas to build on if they are going to make value out of knowledge.

We are talking, of course, of the core of organizations, of the heart of the place. There will still be mundane jobs in these organizations; mail has to be opened, visitors looked after, offices cleaned, light bulbs replaced and meetings arranged. These things will never all be automated nor do they need budding genuises to do them. But unless the heart of the operation is a Triple I concern there will eventually be no added value to pay for the support services.

Triple I organizations are different. Not for them the organizational philosophies of the army, or the factory, or the bureacracies of government. They must look instead to some of the places where knowledge has always been key and brains more important than brawn.

‘Increasingly,’ I said at a conference of chief executives, ‘your corporations will come to resemble universities or colleges.’

‘Then God help us all,’ one of them replied.

But I was serious, although I went on to agree that universities could with advantage get more like businesses.

Universities or colleges, my point was, are places where intelligent people are concerned with information and with ideas, the triple i. They use these three i’s, in theory at least, to pursue truth in an atmosphere of learning.

The new organization, making added value out of knowledge, needs also to be obsessed with the pursuit of truth or, in business language, of quality. To that end the wise organization increasingly uses smart machines, with smart people to work with them. It is interesting to note how often, already, organizations talk of their ‘intellectual property’. Once again, words signal the way things are going.

The wise organization also knows that their smart people are not to be easily defined as workers or as managers but as individuals, as specialists, as professionals or executives, or as leaders, (the older terms of manager and worker are dropping out of use), and that they and it need also to be obsessed with the pursuit of learning if they are going to keep up with the pace of change.

The wise

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