Beautiful Teams

Anticipating 21st-Century Management

It was only while writing up my recollections as a chapter for Beautiful Teams that I reckoned there was something deeper and more significant about my email blast than merely letting off steam. I think Alan and I were exploring a new management style and the role of a new communications technology. The significance wouldn't emerge for 20 years, until management consultants dubbed it a new trend in corporate behavior.

I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter that Edom Engineering management maintained a respect for engineers and a tolerance for their opinionated way of expressing themselves, a legacy of the company's start-up days. Something on Longjump caused this to break down—probably the reluctance of the CEO to argue with investors and for George to argue with the CEO, along with the new lines of command brought in by our merger. The engineers at the grass roots were not prepared to organize themselves to preserve their decision-making power in the face of this breakdown in corporate culture. But another force, technological in nature, stepped in to offer an alternative power arrangement.

We were living in a period before mass online participation, when the World Wide Web ran on only a few dozen sites. Yet already, online communities had experimented with a grassroots political activity that dispensed with traditional leaders and party centers. Although Howard Rheingold's influential book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic ...