S5E7: The Benefits to Flat Organizational Structure with Rod Collins

“If you are leveraging collective intelligence, respecting diversity, and fighting dissenting ideas, you are going to uncover the unknown unknowns more quickly and likely come up with better results.” Rod Collins My guest today is Rod Collins. Rod is a leading expert on digital transformation and the future of business. He's the host of the Thinking Differently podcast on the C suite Radio Network, where he explores how technological innovations continue to transform the rules of how successful businesses work. Rod is a regular blog contributor on Substack and the author of Wiki Management, a revolutionary new model for a rapidly changing and collaborative world, highlighting the innovative tools and practices used by a new breed of business leaders to sustain extraordinary performance in a world reshaped by digital disruption. Rod is a former Chief Operating Executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield federal employee program, one of the nation's largest and most successful business alliances. Under his leadership, the business experienced the most significant five-year growth period in a 60-year history. Today, our conversation centers around the concept of self-managed distributed network corporate structures versus the traditional hierarchy of power and control corporate structure. There are two fundamental ways that organizations can be set up. For the last 150 years, most organizations have followed one model: the centralized, top-down Command and Control hierarchy. The self-managed distributed network is the second model practiced by a smaller number of companies that are more adaptive to change. The form of power that works in the hierarchy is coercive power. In networks, their design principle is nobody smarter than everybody, and so they leverage collective intelligence, and the way things get done is through collective power. One difference between a self-managed network and a top-down hierarchy is that the individual unit of work is the particular person in order. In contrast, in networks, the unit of wor