Creative destruction

Competing in the information economy demands a revolutionary transformation of the organization - a creative destruction of the old, hierarchical, functional entity and its replacement by a new, flexible, IT-enabled network. Many organizations have already embarked on such changes: experiments with reengineering, activity-based costing, and strategic alliances are all elements of the creative destruction process. Yet business leaders need both a framework and a comprehensive road map for managing the entire process, along with the new technologies, structure, and entrepreneurial workforce it creates. Creative Destruction identifies a new and coherent set of 20 management principles for the information economy that provide a sound foundation on which to build a network organization for the 1990s and beyond. This set of principles - concerning such aspects of management as leadership, rewards, organization of tasks, communication, cycle time, and value creation - correlates strongly with financial performance in exhaustive research and company surveys. The authors then unveil a six-stage blueprint for managing the transformation from the old set of industrial economy principles to th