Understanding Organizations...Finally!

CHAPTER 20

Organizations Outward Bound

The term outward bound was originally used to describe ships departing their home port for foreign destinations. Later it came to be associated with an NGO that provides youth with adventures in nature. Here it can be used to describe what many organizations have been doing in recent years.

Bound has two quite opposite meanings. Besides that of going somewhere else—opening up—is that of closing in, “being restricted to or by a place or situation” (Oxford English Dictionary). This chapter discusses how organizations that used to be bound by their borders have in recent times gone outward bound.

Let’s go back to that seven-year-old’s question at the outset, about what is an organization, for example, an Apple. ...