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Management article
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Reference no. 92503
Published by: Harvard Business Publishing
Published in: "Harvard Business Review", 1992

Abstract

Managers must build change into their organization's structure. This means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does as well as constantly creating the new. Without this creation and abandonment, the organization will lose performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. The nature of the organization drives the imperative of change. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes quickly. The organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. We have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society, the organization, is and must be destabilizing. That is why questions of the organization's social responsibility now arise so often and why we need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees and between organizations and society overall.

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Abstract

Managers must build change into their organization's structure. This means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does as well as constantly creating the new. Without this creation and abandonment, the organization will lose performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. The nature of the organization drives the imperative of change. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes quickly. The organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. We have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society, the organization, is and must be destabilizing. That is why questions of the organization's social responsibility now arise so often and why we need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees and between organizations and society overall.

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