The Connected Company

Chapter 14. Pods have control of their own fate

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.

—Phil Jackson

The core building block of a podular organization is the pod: a small, autonomous unit that is authorized to represent the company and deliver results to customers. Pods are flexible, fast, scalable, and resilient.

What is a Pod?

A podular organization is designed so that decisions and changes can be made as quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get permission before they can do anything.

If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the creative forces in your organization, so employees have the freedom to deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting other business activities: pods.

A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.

Process to Pod

Traditionally, it’s been the job of managers to coordinate activity across divisions or lines of business, because processes are usually complex and interdependent. Making changes in one part of the process might solve a problem for that unit but cause problems for others.

The goal of podular design is to reduce that interdependency by enabling autonomous teams to focus on clear outcomes that ...