Many companies now face fast-paced change in market demands and a rapid-fire stream of potentially disruptive innovations in technologies, products, and business models. As a result, maintaining fit with the external environment requires an organization to have the dynamic capabilities necessary to rapidly sense shifts in customer needs and market imperatives, and to seize the opportunities that arise by continually transforming itself. This means that the organizational structure, and where and how resources are deployed, must be highly flexible and fluid.
Most companies find it extremely difficult to achieve this organizational fluidity in practice. However, we have found one company that has made significant strides toward closing the gap between internal flexibility and the rate of external market change: Huawei. Simply put, despite being a US$100billion behemoth with over 180,000 employees that needs to remain highly efficient and cost competitive, Huawei is a living organism that constantly reconfigures itself. In other words, it is a super-fluid organization, and if we look beyond its current political troubles, Huawei can serve as a leading example of the extreme flexibility that more and more companies will need to emulate in order to thrive in the world’s increasingly turbulent and fast-paced business environment.
Authors: Eden Yin, Peter J. Williamson, Xiaobo Wu
Source: Ivey Business Journal
Subjects: Best Practices, Management, Organizational Behavior
Company: Huawei
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