As it shifts from routines of search to a situation in which search is routine, the modern firm is perpetually reinventing itself. Under circumstances of rapid technological change and volatility of products and markets, it seems there is no one best solution. Or, if one could be rationally chosen and resources locked in to it alone, the benefits of its fleeting superiority would not compensate for the costs of subsequent missed opportunities. Because managers hedge against these uncertainties, the outcomes are hybrid forms. Rather than a rational choice among an array of knowable options, we find practical action fluidly redefining what might be an option.
Management becomes the art of facilitating organizations that can reorganize themselves.
The challenge of the modern firm, whether it be a postsocialist firm coping with the uncertainties of system change or a biotechnology firm coping with unpredictable strategy horizons, is the challenge of designing organizations that are capable of learning. In addition to minimal hierarchy they also exhibit organizational heterogeneity. That is, alongside their network structure, heterarchies interweave a multiplicity of organizing principles. The greater interdependence of increasingly autonomous work teams results in a proliferation of performance criteria. Distributed authority not only implies that units will be accountable to each other but will be held to accountings in multiple registers.