As functional effectiveness increases, the greatest opportunity for corporate performance improvement will come from cross-functional integration. Organizations worldwide are recognizing how departments that strive for their own optimal performance can combine to produce sub-optimal results for the business.
Interestingly enough, the focus of management improvement trends in this century follows a similar pattern, from task efficiency to functional excellence to cross-functional integration. The logical next step is to conquer cross-organizational boundaries, i.e., to align independent companies in the pursuit of joint goals.