The Close View
Definition:
A legally established collaborative group inside an enterprise
which sells its services to others.
On Tuesday morning at 9 o'clock we waited in
front of the check-point of a large French car factory near Paris.
We looked forward to a date with one of the most successful Intrapreneurial
Group called Opteam. A very informally dressed young woman
approached us, told us her name was Shirley, asked if we were
the people from the journal "VirtualGuide", and confirmed
that she could offer any information we would like to have.
We were greedy to get some hands on experience
with this new brand of collaborative work which is now imitated
all over the country by more and more employees. The term "Intrapreneur"
was coined some decades ago by Mr. John Naisbitt, who investigated
important trends in the society to come. He expected the single
employee to be converted into a self-employed person, a one-person
enterprise. Three functions of entrepreneurship should be combined
in this social innovation: the complete functional, legal, social,
and financial responsibility for his/her economic decisions; the
ownership of the tools and means of production; and the engagement
in innovative activities for the market. While such intrapreneurial
activity actually came into being, it was limited to certain branches
only, and was not accepted by the majority of the employees. The
exceptions were highly qualified, white-collar employees, like
insurance agents, cameramen, or computer programmers. As the main
objection against this kind of intrapreneurship, the unsolved
problems in case of illness or inability to come to work were
seen. Surprisingly enough, it was not the low sick-leave benefits,
but the difficulty to continue production or provide services
to the mother firm that were paramount. Apart from this, Intrapreneurs
felt uneasy when dealing with complex decisions on their own.
The idea of the Intrapreneurial Group emerged
in a rather natural way. It is a very simple concept: instead
of having all the people working in the firm employed on a wage
basis, some of them form groups which function as small-scale
enterprises. It depends on the contract they have bargained with
the management of the mother firm whether they use their own instruments,
tools and machines or they offer their services by working with
the machinery as property of the firm. In two respects the concept
begins to overcome the traditional social structure of the enterprise:
first, the hierarchy inside the firm is challenged; second, the
status of employees as wage-earners is transformed.
The above figure shows the traditional structure.
Each point in the graph represents a person being on the wage-list
of the firm. Each of them belongs to a stratum within an echelon
of the hierarchy of the firm. Highest ranks are drawn at the top,
lowest at the bottom of the above figure. Intrapreneuring regroups
the persons. While some of them (a minority in the figure below)
still remain employed as before, the majority forms (in the figure
below two) Intrapreneurial Groups, enterprises inside the enterprise.
The members of such a group offer certain services
to their mother firm on a contractual basis. They form a special
institution, an IG (Intrapreneurial Group). This means the group
has legal capacity. As an economic subject, the group has the
right of disposal of property; it may sell and buy whatever it
wants to. The difference to the traditional firm is not only in
size: in the founding phase the members share equal rights, although
they may be changed later for different reasons on a voluntary
basis.
After this introductory information let us
come back to Shirley and to Opteam again. She said the day
was busy, because of their high-quality work a second contract
by another firm located in Japan had recently been offered. In
their profession - car design - distance makes no real difference,
she said. The problem was how and by whom the additional work
should be done. They had to add new members to their cooperative,
and they must be highly qualified.
We accompanied her to her working room. Cosy
armchairs, no evidence of computers, a colorful carpet, and on
three walls photos of natural structures under the microscope.
The fourth wall was covered by a kind of LCD display, a huge screen.
Three controllable TV cameras could look at any corner of the
room. The most impressive feature was that the room was not empty.
Nearly all the chairs were occupied by persons dressed like hippies.
Shirley introduced them as "my team". A strange humming
noise was in the air. One could see that each member of the team
spoke in a low voice into a microphone he or she held in one hand.
With the other hand they operated a keyboard positioned at the
right arm of the chair.
The basic elements of a car - like a skeleton
- were visible on the wall screen. Immediately the room became
silent when a first version of an experimental design of the bodywork
appeared on the wall, overlaying the skeleton of the car. The
picture of the car's surface was divided into segments according
to the mechanical fabrication of the parts. Several minutes passed
without anyone speaking a word. Then - a skinheaded lad broke
the silence. He addressed the back of the car by shouting "rear!"
The color of the rear became more intensive than the rest of the
car. The skinhead manipulated the keyboard and increased the shape
of the rear. Flashing numbers on the right side of the screen
showed the changed cost of fabrication, and the weight and amount
of material needed. Most of the other people had objections to
the new form and did not hold back their opinion but commented
quite openly. A woman asked if she should try to redesign the
prototype. Everybody seemed to agree. For a while we observed
the interactive design process up to the moment when we saw a
completely different shape came into being on screen. Very elegant,
very professional, very speedy looking. The cost fell to a minimum,
as well as the expected weight. One man in shirt-sleeves said:
"It looks fine. Now let's see its performance on the road."
Some keystrokes later he produced a simulation of the car apparently
going through a hilly landscape. Immediately the car became surrounded
by a kind of aura. Shirley explained that now the air pressure
near the surface of the car could be seen. "Excellent intuition,"
the sleevy man shouted in excitement. "We won 10 miles per
hour in speed, or in other words, a reduction of fuel intake of
about 10 percent. Congratulations! Shouldn't we offer her a bonus
for this result? What do you think?" In the upper left corner
a colored bar and some figures appeared. Maggie uttered a proud
"Thank you, folks! Enough work for today", and left
the room, triumphant.
Shirley explained: "This is our voting
procedure. You see in this case there is an overwhelming majority
of pros for the bonus to Maggie. This is easy and fast stuff.
We do not always experience such unanimity. Very often the voting
procedure is a starting point for discussions. After some minutes
the voting is repeated, and usually we find a qualified majority.
If not, our speaker tries to settle the conflict. In case he does
not succeed he decides on his own. But you see he has to use this
instrument very cautiously. It can easily happen that he will
not be elected for the next three month period."
You will understand that we looked forward
to know how the payment of the members of the group is handled.
The answer by Shirley was disarming: "The right of each of
us is to earn the average fraction of the net income of our IG.
So we start like egalitarian groups during the French Revolution.
But we have found that in many cases an equal share is not an
optimal distribution of income. Times have changed. In the last
century where manual work was the bulk of all the activities,
labor time was the basis of the wage. Nowadays, we experience
a much higher demand for good ideas, and for creativity, than
in the past. Through automation within the last decades routine
work was reduced considerably, and the importance of intuition
grew. For that reason we tried to replace equal payment by other
mechanisms. One possibility is to use evaluation procedures from
outside. This method proved to be rather tedious and inefficient:
you have to select a board of experts; you have to pay them; you
have to evaluate the members of the IG in monthly intervals; and
you have to keep the board informed on everything that has happened
in the IG. Distorted reporting will come up soon, the members
will not agree, and the like. So we started to use our own judgment
on the performance of our colleagues. In the beginning, the self-assessment
process was experienced as a piece of cruelty to each other, and
people felt guilty in evaluating others, but more and more it
became a gesture of generosity of the group to increase the income
of one or the other of its members. In most of the events of change
in income the process is used in an upward direction. People usually
tend to reward extraordinary creativity, although at a first glance
they reduce their own pay. But, in the long run, they saw their
own income growing as well. If the turnover is increased by innovations
that are accepted by the market, or production costs are saved,
their individual share becomes higher.
Reducing the payment occur less frequently,
and then in case of emergency only. If some members do not cooperate,
if they repeatedly make mistakes, if they are not creative enough
and do not even strive for creativity, if they are lazy or drunk,
their payment is reduced. To make it difficult to exert power
against weak members, a two-thirds majority rule is needed for
a reduction in income, if the result will be below the average
payment.
The system of payment is really very flexible.
If someone tends to work less hours than the full working week,
it is possible, of course, if the majority does not oppose the
demand. The payment will be adapted accordingly. The two-thirds
majority rule applies for a complete exclusion of a member as
well. Any introductory investment by the member will be paid back.
Up to now we had only one case like this. One man was expelled
because of sexual harassment. He went back to the mother firm,
but could not regain his former position in management."
Another woman intervened: "You cannot
imagine how relieved the group was after he quit. Now we meet
him still at work, when we deliver our final product, but he does
not have the power to command us any longer."
Shirley used her microphone, and in the upper
right corner of the screen a window opened, evidently a video
transmission. The camera next to Shirley showed a red light. On
screen, the face of a bearded man became visible. We could not
understand the conversation between Shirley and this man. She
used ear-phones. After a short interaction, the man nodded and
his picture disappeared.
Shirley explained that she had asked another
IG via visiphone to find qualified persons. He will place the
ad in the "hiring" column of the World Wide Electronic
Link and will test the persons who apply for the job. Not only
professional skills are tested, but social competence as well.
She said that within the few years of existence of IGs, on average
the level of social competence has improved, because people can
now interact and decide on their social situation themselves,
and there is no authority above them to whom they are responsible
other than their own IG.
"Although in the beginning of our IG we
had the problem of how to handle individual demands for the number
and timing of working hours, this we have gradually resolved.
When the members of the group became acquainted with each other,
and discovered the strong and weak points of any of the others,
they started to reschedule the tasks of the IG in such a way that
it became more and more independent of the hours worked individually.
Everyone found their place were they could serve the overall goal
in the best way. The result was excellent. The service to the
mother firm was improved, and tasks were performed in less time
than before. The Peer Care System played an important role in
this improvement. The clients of some Peer Care Groups could be
integrated into our overall activities and increased the efficiency
and the working climate in a favorable way."
"Still," Shirley said, "we face
the difficulty of the blindness of the market. If an economic
depression occurs - and our economic system still is not able
to prevent it - the social climate in the IGs comes under heavy
stress. When the total income of the IG is shrinking, its members
have to reduce their own payment as well.
Fights between colleagues happen more often, a climate of competition takes place, and things are not always resolved in a desirable manner. I, for my person, think that in the future we should modify the system and reduce the influence of the market as an incentive for technical innovation."