Atomic: Reforming the Business Landscape into the New Structures of Tomorrow [Paperback]

“A radical view of the business future … If the authors are right, we’re on the edge of a revolution.” (Research Magazine, April 2004)

“… a highly readable account of the way in which organisational and individual working relationships have changed and will continue to change…” (Professional Manager, March 2004)

“A radical view of the business future … If the authors are right, we’re on the edge of a revolution.” (Research Magazine, April 2004)

“… a highly readable account of the way in which organisational and individual working relationships have changed and will continue to change…” (Professional Manager, March 2004)

In Atomic the authors′ revolutionary theory is put to the test. Looking across all sectors of business, including retail banking, financial services, telecommunications, IT and consultancy, carbon–based corporations (oil and gas companies), and consumer products companies, Camrass and Farncombe discover some real eye–openers, including how truly more efficient these industries become by a change in corporate structure.

The implications for individuals are equally profound and far–reaching. It might take a decade, but it will happen, and nothing will be the same again. Welcome to the Atomic Corporation.

"Farncombe and Camrass put forward a radical, powerful and at times unsettling thesis. If companies are to produce sustained growth and increased returns for shareholders in the world that the authors describe, they will increasingly rely on digital business strategies. For larger companies it means combining the leverage that their greater size affords them, with the degree of flexibility common to successful smaller firms. The companies that do this best will become devastatingly competitive."
—John Leggate, Group Vice President, Digital Business, BP

"In this far–seeing, logical and insightful book, Camrass and Farncombe have provided an invaluable analysis of technology–driven trends which promises to revolutionize the workplace."
—Andy Eggleston, Vice President, E–Business Europe, Ford Motor Company

"Not content with a concise, hysteria–free analysis of the technology–inspired forces shaping our lives, the authors predict corporate future in some detail. Conviction futurism. Bravo! The idea that digital connectivity is the force causing organizations to break apart, and that Megacorp can no longer rely on gravity, is appealing if pardoxical. In this world only full digitzed organizations (large or small) will be eligible to playing the Atomic Business Olympics. The CIO is set to become Corporate Gold Medallist or unemployed."
— Peter Sole, CEO, The Research Board Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Now in a new paperback edition Atomic picks up where Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe′s previous work, The Atomic Corporation: A Rational Proposal for Uncertain Times left off.

Camrass and Farmcombe launch a radical mainfesto for the future of organisations.  They examine the dramatic changes that are going to sweep across the global economy in the next decade. For the last two centuries the business world has been governed by the underlying notion that ′sum is greater than the parts′. The fact is that the balance of power in the business world is shifting, and theory of the firm is going to be turned on its head. The parts are about to become greater than the sum –and you are one of the parts.

So what does this mean for organisations?  Corporations will atomize into core components based around key relationships with all non–core operations devolved to external networks. Instead of being focused on financial assets, the primary unit of corporate value will be the individual, both as customer and employee.  This radical viewpoint has far–reaching consequences for organisational shape, market dynamics and capital structure as well as for our careers.

In the world of Atomic, the core components or atoms of a business are freed and in the process the corporation is redefined. The atomic world will be one in which quality overrides quantity, in which achievement is held in higher regard than paper pushing, and in which you are valued for what you can deliver and nothing else.

ROGER CAMRASS is a Fellow of the Fujitsu Executive Institute and Senior Associate of the Judge Institute at Cambridge University. He has over thirty years’ experience as a consultant, general manager and entrepreneur and has advised companies such as Amex, BP, Coca–Cola, Henkel, IBM and Shell on issues of strategy and corporate style. Roger is also a leading futurist and provocative public speaker. He is a science graduate of Cambridge University and has a postgraduate degree from MIT in business and engineering.

MARTIN FARNCOMBE has fourteen years’ consulting experience with firms such as Price Waterhouse, Ernst & Young and A.T. Kearney. Specialising in procurement, the development of the digital supply chain and the future of organizations, he has advised many of the world’s largest banks, oil companies and governments on the effects of the connected economy. Martin is now a partner at Bridge consulting International.

From the Foreword Our economies' demand for resources may be a constant throughout history but the way they have used them has changed with the rhythm of technological and environmental progress. For the past hundred years or so, the fastest growing economies have chosen to organize themselves into corporations as the most efficient means of production. And since most of us reading this book have grown up in that context it's easy for us to think it will always be so, just as feudal serfs, guild members, and farmers did in their respective times. But just as epic change eventually befell them so the status quo is the least likely outcome for us.

The most important innovation of the industrial revolution was not a technology like the Bessemer steel-making process or the Newcomen steam engine - it was the legal creation of limited liability enterprises - corporations. Why? Because it mobilized the flow of capital, which was a scarce resource in the late 19th century. A blacksmith might start a business based on his family's savings, or what could be borrowed from the village he would serve. But Andrew Carnegie needed capital on a different scale and it's no accident that his name is connected to that of Paul Mellon, the founder of the bank that funded US Steel. The growth of the banking system and the ability to fund industrial-scale projects were enabled by the development of the corporation.

The power of this new economic species proved almost too great. The industrial technologies that corporations developed on a mass scale - like chemistry, electricity, or factory-based production - created so much value and required so much capital that they eventually acquired enormous leverage. In fact, they accumulated power so rapidly that democratic societies had to create new institutions to curb it (such as anti-Trust laws and the Labour Movement). Most recently, it has been consumerism that has again reduced the corporations' room for maneuver. Even so, the corporation seems to be gaining ground as global enterprises take on capabilities that used to belong to governments. Few central banks, for example, can compete with Citicorp in currency markets. So what could change this picture?

Over the past five years, the corporation got a bit of a fright from the dot.com boom. Right now, of course, that fear has become a sneer as Aeron chairs - the emblematic furniture of Silicon Valley - can be picked up for next to nothing at auctions and "free agency" looks more scary than liberating. But this does not mean the corporation is safe.

Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, makes a forceful point: when a technology with truly disruptive potential first emerges, it doesn't work very well. It gets used only in niches where it's specific advantages are strongest. The existing technology is generally too well developed in the established applications to give way to the interloper in its early, crude state. Thus transistors were first popularized in radios, because without the transistor's low weight and power consumption, the idea of a portable radio wasn't possible at all - never mind that the radio sounded horrible.

But the new technology learns from its niche, gets better, and pretty soon names like DuMont, RCA, Philco, and other vacuum-tube-dependent companies have disappeared. Christensen's dilemma is this: successful corporations are generally managed according to the sort of rules that militate against investing in new and risky technology. And this argument applies equally to organizational form to the effect that the new technologies' second bite at the corporations could well be more affecting than the first. The dot.com economy, made of small companies and free agents, bound together by their shared mastery of new networking technology and an equally shared set of values about knowledge, relationships, and competition, invented an economy perfect for the rapid proliferation of information-based, non-capital-intensive businesses. The collapse of many of these businesses has not wiped out this way of working, only the recent approach to getting such companies funded.

The connected and fluid labor markets that bred the dot.coms still exist, just as Internet-based communication still exists among the Chinese intelligentsia even after Tiananmen Square. And this is the disruptive technology that will eventually weaken the corporation. The corporation's last remaining monopoly power (in theory - we'll await the result of the Microsoft trial) is created by the inefficiency of the labor market, which keeps individuals from seeking new jobs as easily as they do new cars. The Net is changing this rapidly, to the benefit of the most talented individuals. As Charles Handy says, "the big challenge for the elephants is that they don't end up as the home for the second rate."

The corporation as we know it is, in fact, in trouble. There is nothing to prevent its demise now that what had previously been its advantages become less important. In fact, its accumulation of power will come to be seen as a kind of historical aberration, like centrally planned economies. This is a big story for the next decade and it should already be capturing our attention. The technologies of communication and collaboration will drive economic power from the institution to the individual, and the decisions about how our resources fulfill our desires will be revolutionized.

How?

Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe have done a courageous thing, and the right one: they have broken the corporation into its constituent elements, identified the forces that determine how these elements can and will combine, and predicted the combinations that will thrive over the next ten years. Rather than picking this or that trend, declaring it universal, and extrapolating it, they have created a chemistry of enterprise, allowing chemical engineers all over the economy to start making their own new compounds, testing them, and determining those that are the most promising. And they have got the crucial things right: connectivity replacing many of the advantages of scale; financial capital giving way to human and intellectual capital…

Christopher Meyer
Director, Cap Gemini Center for Business Innovation --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.