[MUSIC] So, that's the story of the history of one industry, the, the, the car industry. But we now need to move to, to the present day and say to ourself, the other examples of innovations in management happening at the moment. One way of looking at that, at that question, is to say, what are the forces for change that we see happening in the world? And we already talked about these in earlier segments. The most powerful one, I would argue, is the internet itself. Because, of course the internet is not just a technology that enables us to share information. It is also actually, a powerful tool for changing the way that we work with other people. Because, obviously, it actually democratizes information flow, in ways that go against the traditional classical, hierarchical approach. So, when you look at the pioneers of the internet. You look at Linus Torvalds, who was the, the founder of the Linux software product. The open source software product, that now competes, head to head, with, with Microsoft. When you look at Tim Berners-Lee the founder of the internet, of the world wide web which was of course the best way of using the internet. And when you look at Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, all these people, and many others besides, help to create technologies and methods, for doing things to doing work differently, on the internet. Now that might sound it like as a technology store, but of course, there's a whole lot more to it than that because suddenly, we can communicate with the people, in a lateral way, not just as a way of chatting, as a sort of social media game, but actually is a way of getting work done. Indeed the Linux, the software platform, is a very, very effective commercial entity, and it succeeds because it has an army of volunteers, who are working together in a collaborative fashion. With a much more, sort of gentle hierarchical system, than any sort of traditional organization. So, the starting point for any conversation about management innovation today, is really about how the internet makes it possible, to do things differently. Well let me give you some specific examples. The next slide shows example these four companies. These are not companies that you know well. These are companies that are often quite small. I'll just briefly acknowledge what each one is, but you can find more information on each of them in the course packet. We have first of all Morning, Morning Star which, is a tomato processing plant, we've got Valve which is a, a gaming company. Zappos, which is an an online shoe company, which is actually owned by Amazon, and we've also got a company called Topcoder, which is a, a software development company in Boston. What do these companies have in common? They've all got in common, that they are deliberately and explicitly trying to get rid of traditional kind of management roles, they are trying to create methods whereby employees take responsibility for producing stuff. Now they've each got their own story, so I'm not go into the details of them right now. But they're trying out new ways of working which go against, they fly in the face of this traditional assumption that there's a manager and there's a bunch of employees and the manger tells the employees what to do. They're to invert that pyramid and put the responsibility for getting things done in the hands of the employees. So, that's examples which you can actually kind of explore at your leisure. But what I'm going to suggest for the next, next part of this course is that you actually go online and we'll give you the links to these videos, to explore two particular stories in a bit of detail. I'm just going to open up what those stories are all about, and then you can explore them in your own time. The first is a lady called Terri Kelly, she is the Chief Executive of WL Gore. Gore is a private American company a few thousand employees most famous for Gor Tex fabric. In which, many of you have bought at some point in your life. It's a breathable fabric and it's very good for, for walkers. WL Gore product company, very successful. Terri Kelly is the current Chief Executive of the company. And it's a company which is deliberately and always, challenge the traditional norms and assumptions about how we work. So, one example, is that people don't have job titles. People have the role of trying to become effective at helping Gore to do whatever it wants to do. And we don't put people, we don't put people into roles, we give them essentially opportunity to add value where they can most be constructive. So, that's WL Gore. The second example, is Vineet Nayal, who until very recently, was the Chief Executive of HCL Technologies, which is a big IT services company based in India. And he went through over the last eight years, a dramatic reinvention of HCL, from a very traditional company to much more unusual company. A company where he is, is explicitly looking for ways of helping his employees to do their jobs better by servicing them effectively. Again I'm not going to steal his thunder, he talks about his model in the video and it's fascinating to explore what he's done and how those experiments that he's put in place, challenge a lot of our underlying assumptions about the way that the world works. So, that's the next, assignment that we're going to be pursuing in the, in this course. So, just to summarize where we've been in this segment, I've tried to make the point that we need to become more experimental and innovative in how we work. By exploring, first of all, some of the examples of companies that are really pushing the boundaries. Now, I wouldn't claim at all that these companies are kind of cracked all the problems, they are innovators, they are pioneers. What we can say for sure though, is that if their experiments are even half successful. They're opening the door to other companies to continue to expand it. So, that is the, the essence of this segment, obviously as we get into subsequent modules in this course, we're going to be digging an awful lot deeper, in some of the specific principles, that they are challenging, to understand both what the new and the old principles are, in each case.
