ABSTRACT
The last 25 years have seen a shift from emphasis on purely functional organizations, where the idea was to maximize efficiency through specialization, breaking down companies into small units that took care of a single aspect of the business, to more holistic organizations, where even lower-level units were integral parts of the system or a sub-system. We see that from the emergence of the position of ‘product manager’ many years ago to the current emphasis on concepts such as teamwork, flat hierarchies, empowerment, and so on. This makes sense, for the efficiency gains achieved through sheer specialization of units are easily dissipated by the difficulty of coordinating those highly specialized, partialoptimizer units.
