Socially intense operations

Post web era revealing flaws in practitioners' view of organizational development During the initial years of the new millennium, it became clear that the established ways of leading, building and organizing efficient and attractive businesses needed to be revitalized. The so-called web-era had given most practitioners a doomsday feeling in the sense that established businesses would have to give way to new web-based businesses. In fact, it went so far that some established players started their own web-based competitors to compete with their own business instead of giving new players an opening into the business.

The confused feeling could well be traced to what we came to call the transition period. What we saw was that established businesses also had equally established views on how businesses should be built, managed, and organized. These established views relied on solid scientific and empirical basis as they had been formulated well over a period of some 100 years.

Society at large had learned, at least since the days of Frederick Taylor, to build efficient and rational businesses adapted for primarily industrial activities. With the strong growth of the service sector during the last decades of the 20th century, many of these established views had been influenced, but the result had mainly materialized as a copy of the lessons of industrialism. Porter's appreciated publications that influenced most service providers can be seen as a masterpiece in this area. Kursiv text In the highly confused situation that arose at the end of the last millennium, the need to get guidelines for how the service operations would develop came in high demand. The vision became the most central management tool and the visionaries, the bearers of the future vision and the faith in the future, flocked around the top management in all types of businesses.

In this era of visions, not only service operations came to be influenced by the vision doctrine, but it also splashed back on industrial dittos. The vision, which had been in the toolbox for longer some time, came to be seen as more or less a natural law for a given business. There was even talk that indicated that "an employee should be able to wake up at two o'clock at night and right there and then be able to rabble the company's vision", an expression showing how central the vision was and how much energy and resources were put into it as the overall management tool.

We have chosen to call the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the transition period and by that we mean in the real sense not the breach between industrial and service production but more so the breach between the views of how businesses should be built, managed, and organized.