Many businesses tout themselves as radical and disruptive. This is especially true in places like the Bay Area, where small startups with fast-paced, development-driven cultures are trying to develop the next innovative technology.

Building a startup into a successful company requires growth in many areas, including employees and customers. This growth brings with it significant challenges, which often require a difficult transition in how the company operates. As leadership and management functions evolve in an organization, it’s important to retain the same culture of innovation.

The questions asked by MIX are intended to be thought-provoking, as they aim to reinvent management for the 21st century. Indeed, I found them interesting enough that I decided to collect them here.

What if…

we were led by values rather than controlled by bosses?

your company felt less like a bureaucracy and more like a community?

you could offer a dissenting opinion without jeopardizing your job?

we didn’t go to work for a company but dedicated ourselves to a cause?

we spoke the language of honor, truth, love, justice, and, beauty inside our organizations?

the short-term didn’t always trump the long-term and the urgent never displaced the important?

our organizations were truly open to the world?

decision-making reflected more collective wisdom and less politics?

power flowed to those who add value and away from those who don’t?

making a difference was just as important as making the numbers?

our management systems were designed to amplify imagination and unleash contribution?

work felt like play?

the only way to win was to figure out a way for everybody to win?

our companies were as human as the human beings inside them?

people spent a lot less time cutting red tape and a lot more time inventing the future?

you didn’t need permission to try something new?

management education was designed to enlighten and ennoble as much as to promote?

our organizations were highly adaptable, endlessly inventive, and truly inspiring?

management values matched up to management behaviors?

direction came from the bottom-up and the outside-in as much as from the top-down?

organizations grew without losing human scale?

we had such a compelling sense of purpose it would spell the end of micromanaging?

your company’s measurement systems captured the things that really create value?

every leader in your company was someone actually worth following?

our organizations actually deserved the very best that every employee can give?

more people in your company challenged the status quo than defended it?

big ideas were never squashed by little minds?

your company had no secrets from you, its customers, the world?

leaders placed as much emphasis on experimentation as on planning?

authority and influence had nothing to do with your hierarchical postion and everything to do with your ability to lead?

innovation was something that happened because of the system, rather than in spite of it?

every company was great at discovering great ideas and contributions from beyond its borders?

leaders dropped “command and control” for “motivate and mentor”?

our work answered the question, “What’s worth my life?”

people inside companies were freed by trust instead of ruled by fear?

we valued diversity, disagreement, and divergence highly as conformance, consensus, and cohesion?

As I was reading the questions, I couldn’t help recalling the ideas of Umair Haque, whose articles on strategy seem designed as answers to many of the questions asked. That’s no surprise, as Gary Hamel, who Haque cites as a mentor, is one of the people behind MIX.

There are some real gems in there. Let me know your favorites in the comments.

The focus of his thesis revolves around the transition from a traditional economy to an “edge economy,” and how that shift requires firms to rethink strategy and advantage. He recently wrote an article that generated a fair amount of discussion. In it, he had this to say about an “orthodox” strategy:

Competitive advantage is fundamentally about making markets work less efficiently. One catastrophically effective way to do that is to hide and obscure information – to gain bargaining power relative to the guy on the other side of the table.

This observation was made in regard to the failure of major corporations in the financial services industry. By building a system in which information was hidden, value couldn’t be accurately assigned. Of course, banks derive their existence from accurately assigning value, thus such a system is fatally flawed.

Haque further suggests that such decay in strategy is not limited to the financial industry. What is the alternative?

There’s only one real answer: rethinking strategy itself. A world of cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and what’s not.

Here’s a quick example. Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite: release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid.

Building from Haque’s somewhat abstract thinking, Fred Wilson, a respected venture capitalist, gives a concrete example by first citing Ronald Coase’s essay The Nature of the Firm, which explains why individuals choose to form companies rather than trading bilaterally through a market. As Wikipedia summarizes:

there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.

Wilson then correlates the two ideas, tying them back to the technology industry:

What Umair is suggesting is that technology, particularly Internet technology, has changed that equation fundamentally. That the transaction and other costs are declining rapidly and the “nature of the firm” must change as well.

A fascinating discussion then emerged in the comments to Wilson’s post. Jeff Jarvis re-blogged his comment, which further expands on the role of technology and its ability to facilitate models that don’t rely on central command-and-control.

As Fred Wilson remarked in the comments:

Maybe we are entering the time of ’social capitalism’

Where the end users control and allocate attention, money, and ultimately power based on a dynamic and ever evolving measure of trust and social good

It may sound impossible, but as Haque noted today:

As economics changes, so must strategy. What was “strategic” yesterday is less and less strategic today.

And that requires us to have strategic imagination: to be able to imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.