For well over a decade, Gapingvoid friend Jon Husband has been preaching the idea of “Wirearchy”… i.e. in the future, companies will start organizing themselves around centralized networks, rather than strict vertical hierarchies.
And how well one is plugged into the networks defines one value to the company, defines one’s job description.
As someone who has to pay attention to these developments as part of his day job, my jury is still out. On one level, it’s pretty interesting and has lots of possibilities.
On another, there’s the knowledge that the dominance hierarchies we live with have been evolving for billions of year, so they’re going to be pretty hard to displace.
That being said, it’s probably more valuable to see your job description is term of a “node” inside a network, as opposed to a rung on a ladder. To see your company as an organism inside a preexisting ecology, as opposed to another brick in a wall.
People are organic. Ditto companies. Ditto markets.
So now you know.
