Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right. Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom.
A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union. While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.