The Corporate Lattice

Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work

By: Cathleen Benko, Molly Anderson

Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt

The workplace isn't what it used to be - and neither is the workforce.

Today’s companies have fewer hierarchical layers. The nature of work is also more virtual, collaborative, and transparent than at any previous time. Information flows move every which way, shifting from top-down to all-in. And the workforce is forever altered, too. Sweeping changes in expectations across backgrounds, experiences, generations, and gender are challenging long-held, inflexible beliefs about the relationship between work and life—and the very meaning of success.

These transformations, observe Cathleen Benko and Molly Anderson, are also upending the ways people advance along their career paths. Careers zig and zag. Work is what you do, not where you go. The traditional corporate ladder, firmly rooted in the industrial era, proffers a one-size-fits-all view of the world of work. In this audiobook, the authors argue, convincingly, that a lattice model is better suited to today’s global business environment.

The Corporate Lattice provides a framework to help organizations transform how careers are built, how work is done, and how participation is fostered. The corporate lattice model offers leaders a strategic approach to making the most of the shifting landscape by:

• Recognizing that there is no longer a universal view of success but rather a multiplicity of ways to grow and contribute
• Challenging traditional models that pit high performance and career-life fit as opposing forces
• Providing a cost-effective, systematic method to deliver more individualized and engaging work experiences

Offering much more than theory, the authors illustrate the lattice model using rich, in-depth case studies of exemplars, including Cisco and Thomson Reuters.

©2010 Cathleen Benko, Molly Anderson (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

“The right model for the times. The Corporate Lattice takes on worn-out corporate ladder assumptions and convincingly argues that the workplace must adopt more nimble ways to engage its people. This audiobook illuminates a much-needed path forward, showing organizations how to tap into each individual’s performance power to achieve exceptional bottom-line results.” (Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach and New York Times best-selling author)

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Major Management Concepts Discussed

“The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work” claims to be “a resource which provides a framework to help organizations transform how careers are built, how work is done, and how participation is fostered in an age of ever increasing competition.” I chose to read “The Corporate Lattice” to support the development of my competency in Human Capital Management. and to provide potential knowledge to one of my team project proposals, “Employee Engagement in the Federal Workforce”.

Summary

“The Corporate Lattice" is a sequel to “Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce” co-authored by Cathleen Benko in 2008. Ms. Benko at the time of publication of this book was Vice Chairman and Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte LLP. Her co-author, Molly Anderson was Director of Talent for Deloitte Services LP. Ms. Anderson designed and led the implementation of “Mass Career Customization” across Deloitte’s 43,000 employee organization, so it’s easy to see why they partnered for this sequel.

Benko and Anderson start by defining the difference in corporate careers between “now” and “yesterday” as the transformation from a corporate ladder to the corporate lattice, or geometrically from a pyramid to a flat plane or “a three-dimensional structure that extends infinitely in any direction”. True mathematicians may scoff at this analogy but that is only the start of the transformation. From this flat plane workers, and organizations, can then branch in any direction to work, organize, collaborate and advance their careers adapting to the changing world of work. If one can’t comprehend how this transformation works, trust me it does, U.S. Special Operations Command operates this way in the field.

Benko and Anderson then try to quantify how the “work” market is changing and specifically concentrate on high employee engagement and its resultant quantifiable outcomes, specifically:
• Improved shareholder value
• Higher return on assets
• Higher revenue growth
• Higher quality; and
• Higher profitability and productivity (p.26)

Chapter 2 is well worth the study to start research and discussion on employee engagement.

Examples of how to build a career within this new corporate lattice are then described, except this book was published in 2010. How much has changed in our society in eight-plus-years? The Mass Career Customization tool described in Chapter 3 has no relevant web references since 2010. Examples of ways to work and participate within the corporate lattice don’t expand much further than telework or the concepts that work and collaboration can be done from anywhere particularly across the internet. Finally, the case studies exemplified at Cisco, Deloitte (Deloitte, imagine that?), and Thompson Reuters are worth the value to read, but the individual’s guide in Chapter 7 is just as outdated as Chapter 3.

Recommendation:

I would recommend a search for something more current. While the concepts are valid, the examples are almost outdated. The knowledge base of the human world is exponentially increasing and doubling in less than 12 months. Leveraging from Moore's, Cooper’s and Butters’ Laws of processing and data transmission, the world has a constant decrease in the expense of technology with a constant increase in the ease and access by which anyone can connect and use such technology. As such, this book does not take into account the impact of social media on the corporate world, the work environment, or the “corporate lattice” (a term which has been trademarked) in the past 8-years since publication. I was happy I was able to listen to “The Corporate Lattice” as an audiobook, I bought a hardcopy as well.

Very few insights - Common knowledge packaged with a new buzzword

The book tries to package everything from working from home, matrix organizations into a new buzzword of lattice organizations. While the concept of lattice is compelling the author does a poor job to give any practical guidance. The case studies are old school too - the Cisco example of decision making through committees has been portrayed as a lattice way even though Cisco abandoned the approach as it is slowing decision making and took an approach of delegating decisions to teams rather than committees. The Thomas Reuter’s example of centralizing finance function across member companies into a central function is portrayed as a lattice approach while centralization vs. de-centralization is a century old approach.

The audio tone is monotonous too and it was hard for me to personally stay focused.

I bought the book to learn something insightful but completed it feeling that it was a waste of my time.