gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Interesting. Is a loose confederation of skunkworks, (or LCOSW, or skunkworks,) one company, or many? That is, is your multi-billion dollar company a single skunkworks in the confederation, or the whole confederation?

If it's the former - the single node in the skunknet - then things get pretty interesting. I'm thinking it probably can't be fantastically profitable for a single node, though it can be pretty good for every node.

Take as an example a LCOSW that makes, say, a consumer electronics product like iPods; each node creates a bit of value - making hard disks, or batteries, or software - and other SW's assemble them into products, or produce marketing material, or distribute it.

But since they're seperate companies, between every SW pairing (eg, final assembly -> distribution) there's going to be a levelling of profits; if the 'distribution' nodes make obscene profits, the 'final assembly' will demand a piece of the action; their suppliers will demand a piece of -that-; and so on. The whole network becomes profitable, but no node shovels in the cash.

Put another way, each skunkworks can be competed with by new, potential skunkworks. Since a skunkworks is cheap to start, competition will drive prices down. Anyone who demands too big a piece of the pie will just be routed around and starved off the network.

Steve

The loose confederation where the company is a single node in the net (as Steve Cooper described it) is like a Keiretsu. The problem is that the network ossifies and becomes rigid, because the players become overly dependent on the relationships in the network.

"Tom Peters has written about a future scenario where multi-billion dollar corporations are successfully run with only seven employees."

sounds like Charles Handy's "shamrock organisation" to me...

Linky thinking ... it's more than anything a mindset, an attitude, and a way of working based on understandings and agreements.

... rather than instructions or top=down imposed objectives.

A little off-topic, but something I just wanted to ask. I followed the link to Tom Peters blog/site. It seems that Tom Peters doesn't actually post anything there. I'm relatively new to reading blogs, so if I'm missing something, let me know. I just thought it was kind of weird that he would have 3 or 4 other people posting, but he himself is absent.

Stephen,

Tom Peters dot com is a group blog, and Tom does make the occasional post. I think it's only confusing when thinking about Tom Peters as a man, when like Ralph Lauren (and many many others), Tom Peters is also a brand.

Thanks, David. That makes sense I guess.