It’s not a matter of a company rethinking work, it’s a matter of where in your company, and what jobs, merit rethinking. A lot of the chief HR officers I worked with on the CHREATE project believed the tools they were developing about work trends were going to be used by someone trying to understand where their company fits on a continuum.
What we found, however, is that you need to focus on the work, not the company. Within a company, imagine a heat map, where some jobs are great as-is and will be for a long time and other jobs are ripe for change. Those are the jobs to rethink.
Take this example: Somehow, Visa and Apple, two organizations who are experts at what they do and have a deep well of valuable intellectual property, decided it was worth it to go into a room, share trade secrets, and eventually develop ApplePay together. Visa’s not going to attract the personal device technologists that Apple will attract, ever. Apple is not going to attract the kind of payment system experts that Visa attracts and grows. But, both companies understood the vital business importance of playing a big part in mobile payments.
Once you find these areas that are vital to the business but beyond its core competencies, that’s when you can start to unpack the work involved and explore whether temporarily opening up the boundary between two organizations is the best move.