0:09
The third of the four, we're going to call it the, the Quest Model.
What do I mean by that?
Think of oh gosh, then, go back go back in time to,
to famous cases, where people have given themselves targets or missions to achieve.
I'm going to give you an example from the world of prizes here.
What you see in that image there is the so-called X Prize.
Now, you may not heard, have heard of the X Prize.
But the X Prize was created about 25 years ago as a means of stimulating
engineers and scientists and inventors, to do difficult or worthwhile things.
So, the image you see there was the first winner of the so
called space X prize, which was a prize given to the first team,
who could actually send a private vehicle out into space, and bring it back, and
repeat the exercise within a couple of weeks.
So, this was created with a view to stimulating innovation.
The objectives of the X Prize were very, very clearly set.
There were very clear things you had to achieve.
However, there was enormous opportunity or
affordance given, to the teams in terms of how they achieved this objective.
By design, they said, we're not going to tell you how we want you to achieve this
objective, we're just going to tell you what the objective is, and
we're going to give a prize to the winner.
So, there's a very extrinsic goal.
It's, it's a, it's a prize.
Now, were they intrinsically motivated?
Well, yes they were, undoubtedly.
But it's based around this idea,
that we're going to have very explicit, tight objectives, the prize.
But we're going to give people enormous latitude in how they address that
particular challenge.
So, that concept of a, of a prize-based approach.
We talked about it a bit earlier in the previous segment, didn't we,
with Top Coder?
We see many organizations nowadays saying to themselves,
how can we define targets or goals in such a way that we actually stimulate people to
come up with crazy new ways of doing them?
We're not going to tell them at all how to do it.
We're going to just tell 'em what it is we're trying to achieve.
So, that's the quest model.
The final model, we're going to call it the discovery model.
And that is loose on both dimensions.
In other words, both the target, the objective is incredibly kind of vague, and
the means by which we get there is also pretty vague.
2:31
Now, I'm going to use Google as an example here.
It's not a perfect example, but
it makes, it makes the story work in the following way.
Google as a company, does have a very clear mission statement.
It is to organize the world's information, and
make it universally accessible and useful.
Now arguably, that is a clear goal, but of course, it's an incredibly broad goal.
And there's so many different ways that people can actually meet that goal,
that it actually counts as a very loose set of objectives.
And indeed, just recently I read an article, interviewing Larry Page, the,
the chief executive, and he said, in fact, that goal is too narrow,
because nowadays when they're in the world of driverless cars for example,
it's not obvious that, that's linking to organizing the world's information.
So, Google, whether this is a good thing or bad thing, remains to be seen.
But Google now has incredibly, expansionary, very, very loose objectives.
And they are also are incredibly liberal about how people deliver on
those objectives.
They actually give people, particularly their engineers,
enormous degrees of freedom, in how they spend their time.
They have deliberately got very minimalist rules and procedures.
They're deliberately very bottom up, rather than top down organization.
So, very loose ends, and very loose means.
And for Google, at least at this moment in time, it seems to be working for
them quite nicely.
So, you put those two together, and you end up with the following sum,
summary points.
First of all, once I've described these four quadrants as separate things,
you will quickly see that it's very, very rare that you see a pure type.
And in fact, as I told you those four examples, you were probably even
thinking to yourself, well, there's little bits of this and that in each of them.
So, it is absolutely the case, that most organizations are actually hybrids,
that fit somewhere in this matrix, never in the kind of in corners,
often towards the middle.
4:21
A second point to be very clear on is that,
depending on which part of an organization is,
you're in, you might actually be in a different place within this space.
So, if you work in the in a, in the safety part of a big mining company.
If you work in terms of regulation, in a bank, undoubtedly you're going to be
in the bottom left-hand corner, much more in the planning part.
If you work in an R&D organization, the science part of an organization
you're going to be much more in the discovery, or the science model.
So, the point is that your position is a function, not just of the company you
work for, but the actual job you do within such a company.
4:58
Having said all of that,
there is undoubtedly also a kind of a broad trend that we can acknowledge, and
we're going to come back to this in the next module.
Which is that when a company starts out, when a company is a start up,
it is owned by definition, in the kind of the discovery model.
They're trying to find a home for themselves, they're trying to figure out
a business model, that they can make some money out of.
Their ends are very loose, their means are very loose.
Gradually over the years, they start to be successful.
They start to develop a clear sense of direction and priorities, and they start
to build in structures and processes, to enable them to grow into scale.
And so what we've got in the arrow, in this,
in this chart, is a sort of a sense of drift from the top right discovery,
typically down towards the bottom left, in terms of the planning model.
And then there are of course some companies off to the sides.
For whatever reason, because of their particular situations, find themselves in
the kind of the off diagonal quadrants on this particular chart.
But undoubtedly the, the trend is from top right, to bottom left.
So, that is the end of this particular module.
What we've done, obviously, in modules two and three, is we've gone
through in a very systematic way, through the four dimensions of management.
We've looked at alternative principles, as well as the dis,
traditional principles for each one.
We've given examples of how companies are shifting between models, and
then we kind of put it together in terms of these four ideal types.
What we'll do in the next model, module, is we'll get much more
into some of the practical issues, around exactly how companies change.
What do chief executives do, what do front line managers do,
what do day to day employees do?
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
