The Intelligent Organization

"Intelligent organizations employees put their heads together to milk opportunities, co-create products and services, find and solve problems."

"The organizations that are smart enough to deal with the complexity and fluidity of today's world have what computer people call a 'mutable architecture,' meaning the structure shifts to face the problems at hand."

"In the intelligent organization, communications whenever possible are direct, without intermediaries."

"Societies with a dream, with common goals and values, in which individual benefits and common benefits intersect, outperform societies whose dream has dimmed."

"The environment that creates organizational intelligence includes a context rich in information, feedback, mentoring and measuring."

"Ideally, all members of the organization feel they have contributed to aligning the activities of the organization with fulfillment of its mission."

"Truths are easier to face up to and voice in a climate of openness, trust, and confidence, a climate devoid of recrimination."

"The self-determined choices of smaller units create an order and a pattern of integration more effective than any that could be designed or administered from above."

"Free intraprise empowers ordinary employees to start a "business" within the organization if they can find the customers and capital to do so."

"The overall pattern of an intelligent organization is a network of interdependent intraprises and external vendors."

"The right to form intraprises liberates the energy and intelligence of the ordinary employee."

"In choosing what to outsource and what to insource, organizations need to consider that they must retain a robust set of internal competencies that will put them in position to seize new opportunities and weather changes."

"In free intraprise, customers have choices between alternative vendors inside and sometimes also outside the company."

"The growing prevalence of teams with autonomy to manage their area of work is the beginning of the conversion of bureaucracies to free intraprise networks"

"For the organization to develop widespread intelligence and long-range responsibility, the role of current leadership will be to develop leadership in all their people, fulfill joint aims of greater choice and stronger community."

"The challenge is to build corporate communities supportive of many kinds of diversity, not just race, gender, and sexual preference, age and ethnicity, but also supportive of different ways of thinking and seeing the world. "

"An organization can only be smart, well-informed, and wise if its people are wise and interconnected."

"Democracy works best when a firm constitution guarantees the rights of individuals and groups and limits the voting-in of entitlements."

"The vision provided by the center of an intelligent organization is most effective if it does not merely echo the inspired imaginings of a brilliant leader but also captures a sense of what the group knows and believes."