Informal Organization - Business Approaches

Business Approaches

1. Rapid growth. Starbucks, which grew from 100 employees to over 100,000 in just over a decade, provides structures to support improvisation. In a July 1998 Fast Company article on rapid growth, Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said, “You can’t grow if you’re driven only by process, or only by the creative spirit. You’ve got to achieve a fragile balance between the two sides of the corporate brain.”
2. Learning organization. Following a four-year study of the Toyota Production System, Steven J. Spear and H. Kent Bowen concluded in Harvard Business Review that the legendary flexibility of Toyota’s operations is due to the way the scientific method is ingrained in its workers – not through formal training or manuals (the production system has never been written down) but through unwritten principles that govern how workers work, interact, construct, and learn.
3. Idea generation. Texas Instruments credits its “Lunatic Fringe”—“an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company),” according to Fortune Magazine—for its recent successes. "There's this continuum between total chaos and total order," Gene Frantz, the hub of this informal network, explained to Fortune. “About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I'm down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur.