The Centerless Corporation

In their new book, The Centerless Corporation: A New Model for Transforming Your Organization for Growth and Prosperity, authors Bruce A. Pasternack and Albert J. Viscio present several core concepts for building organizations that can survive into and flourish in the twenty-first century. A brief glossary explaining the key concepts follows.

• The Centerless Corporation—a new model, built for growth, that deals more effectively with today's fast-paced complex global business environment and replaces the traditional model with its big central headquarters and command and control style

• People Partnership—a recognition of the new realities that exist in the relationship between the corporation and its employees wherein the company owns the employee's work rather than the employee's career, and the company assumes responsibility for investing in the employee and providing work that makes the individual employable in the marketplace

• Knowledge—a critical CEO issue that will upset the balance of power among companies, causing the demise of some and producing vast opportunities for growth in others

• Coherence—a sense of direction and purpose for the organization that is the glue that holds all of the elements of the Centerless Corporation together and makes the corporation greater than the sum of its parts

• Global Core—a core, greatly different from a center, that provides a sense of essence and purpose and undertakes five missions: formulating identity, building capabilities, minimizing the cost of capital, providing strategic leadership, and exercising control on behalf of the board and the shareholders

• Elastic Building Block—a new type of business unit, introduced to add value, that exploits synergy between business units and through strategic alliances

• Board of Directors—a more active participant with the Core in defining and attaining the overall corporate mission

• Shared Services—a separate unit to supply support services at lower costs and higher service levels and to enable business units to focus on core services

• Leadership—a new model rooted in trust and teamwork and common belief, which must radiate from the top

The Centerless Corporation is the result of one of the most extensive studies ever done on corporate behavior. It incorporates individual company case studies, interviews with hundreds of the world's foremost business leaders, academic studies, and empirical research by Booz Allen Hamilton.