Lesson 17. Unbundling and Rebundling

Twentieth-century organizations were centered largely around profits, government agencies, or nation-centric NGOs. Twenty-first-century organizations will be centered around Sustainable Development Goals in pursuit of Global Grand Opportunities.

To accomplish that, traditional organizations will need to unbundle the existing “stacked” structures of their organizational charts. They will instead need to rebundle themselves around MTPs and global challenges.

Consider the recent history of the banking industry. As FinTech expert Chris Skinner notes, banking until recently meant a one-stop shopping solution. The typical bank offered everything from investing to private wealth management to savings, checking, and home mortgages.

This model, dominant for centuries, is breaking up. New technology start-ups began to appear on the scene around the turn of the century. Consumers could go to PayPal to make payments, to mortgage.com to finance a home,  and to Quickbooks for a small business loan. Today, the once monolithic banking industry has fragmented into thousands of companies. Banking has become unbundled. And customers can now rebundle them: creating customized packages of services to fit their specific needs for specific projects.

Organizations in many other industries have been similarly traditionally bundled. Think of a single organization with multiple operations: HR, legal, finance, sales and marketing, and so forth. This historic organizational scheme may seem inevitable, but that’s what we thought about banking. The fact is, in the future, as we move to an abundance economy and profit-driven organizations become less necessary, we’ll unbundle those anachronistic structures too—and rebundle them to fit our new interests, such as SDGs.

Of course, those rebundled pieces will be largely AI-driven, enabling hyper-rapid scaling. You won’t be surprised to learn that the companies best suited today to lead the move to unbundled/rebundled enterprises are ExOs—and they will do so with the help of their Communities.