The Internet is a bold experiment in management. It is the largest self-governing confederation of organizations ever. Participation and compliance with standards are purely voluntary, yet the extent of each is extraordinarily high. What if you ran your organization as if it were the Internet?

Book Notes:
"The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design"
from Coordination of the Internet
edited by Brian Kahin and James Keller
MIT Press, 1997.

By examining the way the Internet is "managed," Gillett and Kapor raise provocative questions about organizational options appropriate to the "Internet age." Consider the voluntary nature of Internet participation, for example. No one is "required" to comply with connection protocols. Yet because the benefits far outweigh the cost, participation and compliance are high. As the authors note, "The free choices of millions of individuals led to much more universal adoption of the common Internet protocols than any of the other more centrally mandated alternatives." (eg. SNA, DECnet, XNS or even OSI).

How often have your organizational "mandates" failed to achieve the desired objectives? Perhaps more Internet-style organizational thinking would help!

Would you set up a structure that does not enable or force one part of the confederation to control or manage another?

This characteristic of the Internet means that there is no "primary" node. Hence, the network is not dependent on or regulated by any of its parts.

Organizationally, this might mean that instead of "gatekeeper" roles for staff groups like human resources or quality, we would build accountability for such things into the management system. In such a system, for example, human resources would not tell line management whether they could or could not give a salary increase. Line management would be responsible for ensuring equity across the organization, consistency of rewards, etc.

Such a system has many pro's and con's. The point is not that one "formula" will always work but that thinking through the implications of the alternatives will help you arrive at a better structure for your organization.

Internet-style management thinking:

It's not about speed! How might your thinking about your organization change if you imagined your organization is the Internet? Try on the following ideas for starters.

• Distribution of function and authority
  Would you distribute functionality and authority based on the premise that it is better to consider and reject user control for a good reason than not to consider it? Let's say you're looking for a higher degree of consistency in the way products are developed across your company. Whether you are managing an engineering services group responsible for developing the processes or a development group, this Internet governance premise might cause you to focus on what is handed off between groups rather than how each group creates its part. Or, it might cause you to extract the process from current engineering practices in your organization rathe

• Interoperability as a value
  Would you develop a culture where people hold interoperability as a shared goal? "Interoperability is like Tinkerbell: it only works if everyone believes in it." (from the paper discussed above)

  This one is harder! Policies and structures are easier to change than culture. However, they often fail to "stick" unless they are in sync with the culture. Culture is maintained and transmitted primarily by stories.

  Your mission (should you choose to accept it) would be to cause the "right" experiences to be seen in the "right" way so that the "right" stories are told to the "right" people about those experiences. That, over time, will cause the culture to shift in the "right" direction, which in this case is toward interoperability as a shared goal.

These are just a few possibilities for management Internet-style. If you read the self-governance paper, even a quick read, you'll see many other possibilities.