The world is flat says Tom Friedman. The earth's skin is stretching, continents are adrift, and markets are fragmenting. Product offerings are multiplying before our eyes. Welcome to the age of "brainwork," where entertainment midst throngs of other fields, has been pulled into the land of the fickle, ephemeral, and certainly the impermanent.
 
Trend-finders in organizations are peaking over the horizon, not at all sure about what lies there. We're seeing this through the machinations of industry monoliths like Channel Communications or Hewlett Packard; groping to forge a better route. This movement toward the light is not really new nor is it trendy. As far back as the Eighties, cutting edge companies such as Ross Perot's EDS were realizing that there was no port in the oncoming storm; so EDS retooled their seven billion dollar annual revenue stream, and their 72,000 employees into teams of ten. These teams were assigned the task of undoing the establishment, rocking the boat long before it needed to be rocked. It worked like a Delta Force landing. Perot taught us something else, though we wonder if the lesson stuck.
 
During Perot's brief flirtation with General Motors at the height of frustration over GM's plodding serpentine manner of arriving at a solution, Perot made this comparison. "At General Motors when someone sees a snake crawling around they form a committee to hire a consultant on killing snakes. At EDS if we see a snake on the floor, we kill it." Graphic but nonetheless true.
 
Competition is now a fluid asymmetrical war of motion where success depends on developing people and teams who can anticipate trends, beat competitors to solutions, and above all, respond to customer needs. Incidentally for those of us in radio, that means two sets of customers: listeners and advertising clients.
 
We advocate that in today's media environment the secret of strategy is not the structure of your company or its markets, but the dynamics of their behavior. When will we finally accept this? As we suggested to NAB Fly-In attendees a while back, "Either the devaluation of our programming culture is finished...or we are."
 
Too many companies insist on clinging to the institutional icons where CEOs are the "chief organizers." In fact, it should be just the opposite. Today's leader had better think about becoming the chief disorganizer so as to challenge your emerging leadership to avoid the trap of safety. If you see a lot of people in your organization spending a lot of time trying to prevent something from "going wrong," you know that while they may be successful at it, not much new and powerful will happen either.
 
If your company is willing to break itself up into intelligent creative pieces, toss away the we've always done it this way blanket in exchange for a new, lean, aggressive shared authorship of plans and ideas unseen (and yet untried), you can start having real fun... before your competitors do.