Showing results by author "John Hagel III" in All Categories

Whether you’re running a business, building a career, raising a family, or attending school, uncertainty has been the name of the game for years - and the feeling reached an all-time high when COVID-19 hit. Even the savviest, smartest, toughest people are understandably feeling enormous pressure and often feeling paralyzed by fear.

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that theyve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream.

The great entrepreneurs of the last century - folks like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison - spawned huge companies that were designed around a model of scalable efficiency. In that model the job of workers was to fit into their roles and perform tightly specified and standardized tasks in a highly reliable and predictable way. The employee society was born.

Look beneath the surface of most companies, and you'll actually find 3 kinds of businesses: customer relationship management, product innovation, and infrastructure management. The authors provide a roadmap for unbundling these core processes and rebundling them into a more efficient - or an entirely different - organization. This article, which originally appeared in the March-April 1999 Harvard Business Review, is offered in audio form exclusively through Audible.