Innovation and agility in the digital age africa, the worlds laboratories of tomorrow

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age


Human Resources Management Set
coordinated by
Jean-Luc Cerdin

Volume 2

Innovation and Agility
in the Digital Age
Africa, the World’s Laboratories
of Tomorrow

Soufyane Frimousse


First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
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© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Soufyane Frimousse to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965268
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-404-9


Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

Chapter 1. Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial
Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1.1. Digital disruptions of management . . . . . . . .
1.2. New and fundamental insights . . . . . . . . . .
1.3. From pyramid to platform . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.4. Motivation by profit and especially by purpose

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Chapter 2. The African Continent: Laboratory
Tomorrow’s World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2.1. The frog’s leap, the leopard’s run and agility . . . . . . . .
2.2. Rebel talents and serial learners in dynamic rootedness . .
2.3. Rooted leaders/entrepreneurs, adventurers and hustlers at
the service of African singularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4. An African citizen educated and trained to think within
organizations, who can speak and must be listened to . . . . .

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49

Chapter 3. The Mediterranean: Marrying the Future
without Divorcing the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

3.1. The Mediterranean: crossroads of civilizations, one-way
street or dead-end street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.2. Drawing from the Mediterranean thanks to people of transposition.
3.3. Neither adoration, nor submission, but self-realization . . . . . . . .
3.4. Zones of fertility in “layer-cake” societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129

Postface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

131

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

137

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149


Foreword

Simply mentioning “Africa” as a reference in a particular model often
involves a notorious misunderstanding of a continent whose land mass is
larger than that of the United States, Oceania and Europe put together,
whose number of languages is probably greater than 50,000 and whose
cultural origins are among the most complex. We often hear “Africans are
this or that”, and quite often it is a coarse approximation of an infinitely
more subtle reality.
However, what remains common to the African continent, without a
doubt, is a lag in development compared to the rest of the world, generally
described as a permanent stain whose effects continuously reappear in
economic matters, in human development and in social, environmental and
educational matters.
It seems to me that the real difficulty is in moving away from a given
context to try to draw out long-term perspectives, without necessarily relying
on identified trends, but trying to identify a few weak signals which might
constitute overdetermining factors in the medium term. In this regard, there
is no doubt that development in Africa must experiment with new pathways,
if only because current dynamics paint a picture of a continent with different
characteristics: Africa will thus, like Asia, be more than others a continent of
megacities, city-states whose populations will be higher than 10 million
inhabitants.
The UNDP thus predicts that Africa will host no less than 18 of these (out

of a total of 70 by 2050). Concerning energy, Africa could well be one of the
first continents to implement smartgrids on a large scale (Huawei is currently


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

carrying out several experiments with these technologies in Addis-Ababa,
Cairo and Nairobi), technologies in which much hope is placed to bring
about a new model of electrical energy. Finally, as for flows of technology
and skills, the traditional North–South axis could quickly be challenged by a
South–East axis, as not only China (with its immense “One Belt One Road”
initiative), but now also India seem willing to develop long-term
partnerships with many countries.
Yet, these three trends are only rarely emphasized by the media when
Africa is discussed. However, they will inevitably lead to the emergence of a
model of development which, several decades from now, will be considered
very different from what is observed in the West.
Consider also Korea or Japan, two countries who were not spared in the
memoirs of General MacArthur: reading them shows how much the general
thought them incapable of developing, particularly Korea. However, not
only has their expansion been remarkable (South Korea was poorer than
Mali from then until 1960), but it has involved creating their own
technological and especially managerial culture.
To bet that Africa might become a model for innovation and management
seems very daring at first sight. Few observers would risk such predictions.
As Soufyane Frimousse emphasizes in this work, the African model of
management – as we perceive it – is too often one of the worst caricatures of
the Western “command and control” type of model, inherited from the mills

and forges of the 19th Century, which we never cease to try to eradicate in
our own latitudes.
However, this is to ignore vast social spaces, those of the family, those of
village circles and those of the informal economy, whose organizational
capacities are remarkable in more than one way. If these are not expressed in
the productive base it is because the technologies, carefully imported from
the West, have not been disassociated from the managerial cultures which
came with them. Quite often, African management has given up on its model
of interaction and consultation, faced with technologyʼs potential for
intimidation. We might speak of the “magical” intimidation of technology;
the technological supernatural representing a transcendent factor, situated
above humanity and imposing itself on all. This is not a negligible factor: it
was through taking account of a technological breakthrough – the atomic
bomb – above and beyond everything known at the time, that the Empire of


Foreword

ix

Japan and its emperor surrendered, as fanaticized as they were by the
messianic nature of their war.
Although many decades ago, anthropologists identified the factors which
have, in many regions of Eastern as well as Western Africa, given rise to
significant social sophistication and harmony, rare are those who have risked
translating this into the world of business. Yet, several factors are actually in
the process of creating a new model, in Africa.
The first of them is leaving the neo-colonial era behind: in many
countries, particularly Francophone ones, the former master is still an
economic, technical, social and political reference from the very fact of

maintaining the links which were created over centuries. However, though
these links remain important, they are increasingly less determining or
dominant.
The second consists of the emergence of a global digital culture:
managerial reference points have been overwhelmed in the West as in Africa
by the emergence of a culture based on open-source, collaboration,
proceeding by iteration or “building to fail”, so-called “agile” processes, etc.
Now, this culture is particularly powerful and acts like a wave against an
aging dike: it washes it away, allowing the reappearance of local cultural
characteristics which had been buried but never quite disappeared.
The third consists of the nature of African innovation. Inspired by
massive necessity more than by industrial sophistication, constructed mainly
outside of traditional scientific laboratories, African innovation is profoundly
“jugaad”, to take up the concept promoted by Navi Radjou. In a digital
world dominated by the GAFAM companies and in a region where political,
judicial and economic institutions are often unstable, it has developed
rapidly and on a large scale, bringing forth a unique and diversified model.
These three factors, non-exclusive of the others mentioned in Soufyane
Frimousseʼs work, are not negligible. Whoever has the opportunity to meet
African entrepreneurs, particularly in the digital field, can see that the time
for condescension is gone. Organizational models, business models and
techniques emerge and develop effectively: mobile currencies (M-Pesa) and
their associated services (M-Kopa for payments for solar electricity);
renewable energy (the municipality of Kampala has just put out a call for
tenders to reduce its energy consumption to 0% gas and carbon emissions)


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

and open and collaborative services for trash collection (ArClean); medical
tools for access to diagnosis and care (CardioPad); applications for checking
agricultural prices (M-Farm); popular social networks (Mxit) and so on.
Solutions imagined and designed by individuals, entrepreneurs, students,
researchers, scientists or artists may sustainably inspire the rest of the globe.
The entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the African economic boom
should be sustained, improved and supported so as to participate in the
invention – even the re-enchantment – of the world of tomorrow. If we must
globalize African innovation, we must also Africanize global innovation to
instill a digital vision which is more inclusive, sustainable, creative and
useful.
Although Western societies are currently remarkably efficient, they
remain confronted with complex challenges: how to maintain technological
and innovative leadership with a population whose aging is accelerating?
How can we conceive of sustainability in a model which only tolerates
reformist policies with difficulty, and breaking with models even less? These
questions are not insignificant. The study of history shows two impressive
constants: the first is that nations have always neglected the factors that have
led to their marginalization. Thus, the Chinese empire was excessively
welcoming to the British and Dutch who arrived to open trade offices and
free ports, without realizing that the economic power of these merchants was
powerfully defended by military power that would not hesitate to impose its
conditions on the Qing dynasty after the Opium Wars. The French empire
did not understand that the British financial model, its legal stability, offered
greater potential for development and thus a larger capacity for territorial
expansion, and so on.
The second is that models of innovations are systematically condemned
when they appear. From the Jacquard loom, to Fordist organization, to
Toyotism, to the Internet revolution, these have all been the object of

critiques almost always coming from the most orthodox representatives of a
generally dominant model. Here, too, new tendencies are not generally
detected. However, if we watch what is happening in Africa, we can only
observe that the coming generation is beginning to assert its vision, a
mixture of an assumed expression of the principles of consultation belonging
to ancestral cultures, a mastery of technological principles and the cultural
models that this entails, a capacity to take large risks and a desire to
self-emancipate from known frameworks. These are some of the factors


Foreword

xi

which underpin the managerial and innovation culture of Africa and,
probably, of the world to come.
Gilles BABINET
Digital Entrepreneur.
Digital Champion of France at the European Commission.
Vice-President of the National Digital Council of France.


Introduction

Contemporary managerial reality is based largely on a universalist logic.
This vision rests on the convergence of organizations towards a single and
universal management model proclaimed to be the “one best way”. This
involves Fayol’s famous “planning, organizing, commanding and
controlling” and its multiple derivatives, which are based on the Taylorist
and Fordist models that we can sum up in the formula “command, control

and execute”.
This prototypical model of traditional business is called into question in
current and future contexts. In fact, the percentage of employees who feel
disengaged from business never ceases to rise. According to a Capgemini
study in 20141, the figure has risen to 40%. According to a study by Gallup2,
the score is 80%. These figures lead us to question the foundations and
practices of organizational management.
In fact, among Fayol’s principles, it is command and control that are
strongly challenged in their application. With the major principles remaining
stable in their broad lines over a century, new models of management must
innovate in every dimension while particularly taking account of
developments in society, themselves accelerated by the digital revolution.
These upheavals have provoked many organizations to question their mode
of management, moving from a traditional pyramidal organization to an
agile structure. It is now necessary to have employees who are reactive and
autonomous and who possess adaptive capacities.
1 Capgemini. (2014). À l’écoute des français au travail.
2 Etude Gallup sur l’engagement des salariés (2014).


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

In this context, new modes of organization emerge, copying startups in
giving more freedom of action to everyone and engaging with employees in
a more personalized way. Within the well-known models of the GAFA
companies (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), their Chinese
equivalents, the BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi) and the
NATU companies (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber), management is now

horizontal, organized into small groups with strong autonomy.
These companies which have become giants have freed themselves from
most classical organizational management practices to adopt others, issuing
from the digital revolution. Agility and disruptive innovation have become
the key dimensions here. All these are found at the heart of many African
and Mediterranean cultures and enterprises, which now explains why
multiple innovations originating from Africa are beginning to be
internationally exported, part of the beginning of the globalization of Africa.
Africa is a unit at the level of the African Union. It is a giant continent. In
contrast, there are plural Africas at the level of geography, history, economy,
culture and political situations.
At the managerial level, African and (southern shore) Mediterranean
firms are often cited as examples not to follow. In a large proportion of the
managerial literature, methods and practices deriving from the African
continent and the southern shore of the Mediterranean are ignored or
considered to be archaic or quaint. From these descriptions, we get the image
of an Africa condemned to marginalization. Our work is opposed to this
simplistic vision. We believe that the African innovations which have
emerged over the past ten years are directly linked with a managerial model
which responds perfectly to the digital era.
Following on from the lines of research of George et al. (2016) on the
specificities of management in Africa, our work thus has the goal of grasping
and describing the methods and processes which allow transformations to
succeed and promote innovative and agile behaviors which are likely to
create value for firms and their stakeholders while improving their
competitiveness. We follow the recommendations of Zoogah et al. (2015),
who encourage researchers to develop an understanding of African
organizational dynamics, which call for appropriate theoretical and empirical
approaches to improve knowledge.

Introduction

xv

These advances are also potentially useful and rich in learning
opportunities for non-African organizations and research.
Innovation is not creativity. Being creative means having ideas. Being
innovative means putting these ideas to work. Creativity involves reflection,
while innovation involves action. As creativity belongs in the domain of
psychology, it may be encouraged by various techniques such as
brainstorming. Conversely, innovation belongs in the domain of
management. It involves moving into action, ensuring that new ideas are not
killed by the organization, its routines, its budgetary constraints and its
power struggles, and that they find their way to the market. If creativity
generally has a cost, only innovation is likely to make a profit.
Practices which qualify as innovative originate from firms, leaders,
entrepreneurs and citizens. They are the result of exchanges between people
and of experiments. Innovation in management includes innovation in
organizing people, in managing systems, communication, social relations
and the organization of work. Managerial innovation is an approach which
may allow firms to develop and sustain their activities. Managerial
innovation is based on: the capacity to differentiate oneself from
competitors; the capacity to promote agile behaviors so as to adapt to
changes; and the capacity to attract and retain engaged and passionate
employees. Managerial innovation consists of responding to many
challenges: the development of agility; the enhancement of pleasure and
well-being at work; the improvement of collaboration, cohesion and
collective intelligence; the establishment of relations based on trust; the
stimulation of innovative behaviors; and the improvement of engagement

and loyalty.
Africa is a reservoir of technological, managerial and societal
innovations. In Africa, technology is not a gimmick. It responds to vital
necessity. Here, we encounter jugaad, the art of innovation with limited
resources proper to emergent nations of which the Indian Navi Radjou has
become the guru. Africa has jugaad in its DNA, with its very collective
functioning and the art of doing more with less. Innovations are rooted
in territories.


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

In his book Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker (1993) describes the
influence of major developments in the economy and society since the
Middle Ages on the models of organizations. Based on this perspective, this
book presents the managerial developments that emerged in organizations
after the anthropological revolution and the acceleration of digitalization that
is closely connected. These revolutions are discussed and analyzed.
The key dimensions of new forms of organization (structures, methods of
work, etc.) and innovation underlying the digital revolution within the most
innovative organizations in the world are presented.
Developments involve the impacts of digital technology on some
organizations in Africa, which have led them to rethink their organizational
and innovation models. In fact, some African firms offer products and
services which are more than just copies of their international counterparts.
These organizations are based on real managerial characteristics, including
frugality.
Do these “made in Africa success stories” not draw the outlines of a new

model of management and innovation for firms in the digital era?
Our reflections are based on the cultural, economic and managerial
dimensions of the Africas and of the Mediterranean world, inserting them
into a historical, geo-strategic and socio-political framework. With
movements of challenge and revolt in the Arab countries, the Northern
countries have discovered, often with amazement, that the quest for liberty
and human rights also continues on the southern shore of the Mediterranean
and that it is not exclusive to the northern shore. The eternal imaginary
dissymmetry of East and West and the insurmountable pseudo-barriers
between “them” and “us” break down. These new data offer the chance to
deepen this approach to the Mediterranean as a hidden source. This work
thus encourages us to discover or rediscover the Mediterranean as it is. It
shows the discrepancy between Mediterranean realities and well-meaning
discourses and speeches. It involves going behind the lighted stage of
intercultural dialog, and dissecting the darkness of the facts. We interrogate
historical and cultural fractures so as to sketch the forms of their possible
supersession, as the Mediterranean may constitute a hidden source.


Introduction

xvii

We insist on the claim of the Mediterranean, which seems to be echoed in
those countries with cultures strongly influenced by the varying dogmas of
the dominant model: cultural, economic, societal and managerial. This claim
is expressed through: a form of resistance to the society of acceleration and
consumption; a need for authenticity and relationships expressed in
the notions of tribe and embeddedness; a need for singularity; a quest
for well-being; and a management of people and no longer of

human resources.


1
Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the
Managerial Revolution

The digital revolution is one of the major turning points of humanity, at
the same level as the invention of writing and the invention of printing by
Gutenberg which made possible the emergence of the Enlightenment. The
digital transformation is a technological revolution comparable to the
appearance of electricity, except that it has changed the world in 20 years
instead of a century!
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb and the like have attacked and
disintermediated a large number of professions which thought themselves
untouchable, like booksellers, advertisers, taxis, hotels and so on. Today,
instead of going to a bookstore, a 21st-Century person goes to the Amazon
website.
After four years, the Airbnb startup offers over 200 countries more rooms
to rent every day than the Hilton group, which has built up its heritage over a
hundred years. Uber, like Airbnb, shows that user experience is superior to
regulation. Uber not only interacts with 10 million customers and 200,000
drivers, but also interacts with banks, payment systems, traffic information
systems, social networks and so on. The more the firm interacts, the more it
creates value and becomes indispensable for its users. Joël de Rosnay (2016)
describes these firms as “disruptors” (or disruption). In the classical model,
goods and services are distributed by networks to reach consumers and
create a profit margin. In the disruptive model, platforms allow the creation
of added value by customers. It is then reused by these firms to resell it to
others.

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow,
First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse.
© ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

The art of disruption or “Uberization” thus corresponds to businesses
who have accomplished the disintermediation of traditional structures
through offering more personalized services and products, more rapidly.
Disruption is based on technological reappropriation by citizens who create
innovative systems which will change habits, ways of life and
communication. It is thus not a discovery that will change things.
It is rather the convergence between these elements. Gilles Babinet
(2016) adds that innovation is also affected since previously, it was
incremental. The best example is that of the internal combustion engine
whose performance has progressively developed over a century and a half.
Now, innovation also involves disruption.
All these ruptures or disruptions are supported and accelerated by the
development of technologies which are shaping a connected, globalized and
rapid world in perpetual motion, which profoundly changes ways of
thinking, communicating and working. For “Millennials”, the smartphone is
not a tool of communication, but a prosthesis. They are capable of carrying
out multiple activities by downloading applications. Smartphones in
particular allow us to interface with transmitter–receiver tools
communicating directly between the body and the machine (Internet of
Things). Technologies have changed our perception of space and time! The

level of sophistication of these devices is such that we interact with
machines more than with people.
These very fast machines lead to shorter time, which is one of the aspects
of this anthropological revolution. Technologies have not reduced distances;
they have suppressed them. Ways of accessing knowledge have also
profoundly changed.
For Michel Serres (2012), computers, including all information
technology including the Internet, smartphones, etc., will affect all areas of
life (law, politics, commerce, religion, education, finance, etc.). With the
digital era, human beings hold the world in their hands. In fact, they hold
their devices in their hands and, if they wish, they can communicate with
every place in the world and access every piece of information at any
moment, and they are slashers (holding down several jobs) or freelancers (in
business for themselves).


Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution

3

They overcome natural stupidity and move towards artificial intelligence.
Thanks to smartphones, artificial intelligence, robotics and the power of
interconnection between them, human beings multiply their capacities due to
the emergence of increased collective intelligence. This means a real
mutation of the human species.
Joel de Rosnay (2016) predicts the emergence of an “increased collective
intelligence” which will lead to hyperhumanism, which according to him is
something much more preferable than transhumanism, which promotes the
use of science and technology to improve the physical and mental
characteristics of human beings. Ray Kurzweil (2005), an icon of

transhumanism, believes that exponential technological innovation will
allow us to conquer death and eventually give rise to machines that are more
intelligent than humans. Kurzweil (2005) identifies genetics, nanotechnology
and robotics as the three revolutions that will define our lives in the next few
decades. The adepts of transhumanism dream of being able to transcend
humanity through artificial intelligence by creating superhumans and
individual supra-intelligence. This vision is far from being unanimously
welcomed.
For de Rosnay (2016), transhumanism is inhuman, as the transformations
foreseen in the body or the brain are reserved for a privileged few, and life
and death are inseparable and indispensable. However, transhumanist
advances may lead, thanks to philosophical reflection on pushing the limits
of the human body, to prolonging life expectancy and may contribute to
positive human and social evolution. Already, connected objects act in
symbiosis with humans. It is this integrated and collective symbiosis which
humanity should create, and this is the challenge that current and future
generations should meet. We realize through these crucial questions that
digital transformation is not to be addressed solely via the technological
angle of digital tools. It is also and especially a matter of human beings – but
also of management and organization.
1.1. Digital disruptions of management
The development of digital technology has upset the business world in
its organization and its managerial system. Traditional organizations
appear outdated and incapable of handling the transformations caused by
this mutation. With its descending circuit of information, its centralized


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

decision-making process and its very hierarchical relationships, the classical
organization has proved its effectiveness for a long time. These hierarchical,
functional, matrical, etc., models of operation, widely studied by
Henry Mintzberg (1990), are very useful for building organizational charts,
understanding the relationships between support functions and operation
functions, and adapting managerial positions. A manager in pyramidal
organizations favors a formal mode of reasoning which does not promote the
development of intelligence, sensitivity or intuition, but rather the
acquisition of automatic behavior patterns and conditioning of the
“problem-solving” type.
William Whyte (1956), in The Organization Man, aptly describes how
pyramidal firms maintain and create conformism. These days, the need for
innovation and agility, associated with the influence of digital technology on
behaviors, puts into question this schema, which is proving too constraining
to adapt rapidly to changes in clients, the market and employees. It is now
necessary for employees to decide quickly and to be empowered to
iteratively test which options are the most suited to a given context. In a few
years, innovative companies, with outstanding management who break with
conventional wisdom, have thus become giants of the global economy. In
2017, these groups have accumulated more than 250 billion dollars in
turnover. The GAFA firms (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) are
worth 1,740 billion dollars after 23 years of existence. The NATU firms
(Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber) are worth 140 billion dollars after 14
years. The Chinese BATX firms (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi) are
worth 460 billion dollars after 14 years.
It seems difficult to disconnect such results from the organizational
environments that they put in place and the way in which they think about
work. Is it a new managerial paradigm? What are its innovative aspects? In
the next section, we will explore a few of these.

Amazon’s subsidiary Zappos, an online commerce site, has enacted
“holacracy”, which is a mode of organization based on shared
responsibilities for employees and transversality of skills. Employees are
thus asked to act like entrepreneurs and to take initiative rather than to wait
for orders from their manager. Holacracy has already been adopted by more
than 300 firms worldwide.


Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution

5

Isaac Getz and Brian M. Carney (2012) describe another form of
organization which they name “liberated companies”. These give their
employees responsibility, granting them confidence and leaving very wide
decision-making autonomy to their workers. This encourages mutual
listening and collaborative work. Teams are motivated, involved, faithful
and much more productive. In a liberated company, control is not lost; it is
shared. Orangina and Michelin are engaged in this approach. Frédéric
Laloux (2015) recommends establishing freedom of decision-making at all
levels of the organization. Customer satisfaction derives most often from
initiative, which is the result of teams being granted autonomy. Frédéric
Laloux (2015) cites and analyzes the example of the Favi and Buurtzort
companies, which show the importance of “empowerment” of the team
which becomes responsible for its business objectives. Laloux (2015)
constantly underlines the importance of continuous improvement with the
influence of lean management in the sense of the Toyota Way.
As part of the same movement of managerial innovation, Kazuo
Inamori (2012) has developed for his group a method called “Amoeba
Management”, which consists of dividing the organization into small

operational units each under the authority of a leader. They are called
“amoebas”. The leader is in charge of creating the goals and action plans for
the amoeba with their team. The amoebas function as teams in collaborative
mode. “Amoeba Management” is used by approximately 600 companies.
A movement called “adaptive enterprises” or Responsive Organizations
has also been created in the United States, which brings together all the
features found in holacracy and liberated companies. This movement values
collective intelligence. An adaptive organization is “learning”. Galindo
(2017) presents the dimensions of the ideal type of human resources
management in start-ups through the French acronym C.I.D. (Knowledge
(Connaissances), Challenges, Conviviality / Informal, Involvement,
Initiatives / Delegation, Right to be wrong (Droit à l’erreur), Distribution of
incentives). Human resources are judged by their updated knowledge. They
are often challenged. Thus, to avoid the excesses of individualism,
maintaining conviviality is a priority. The company favors informality at the
level of exchanges and monitors the degree of involvement. The spirit of
initiative is encouraged.


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

Employees are encouraged to become personally involved in resolving
collective problems and to self-manage due to delegation of responsibilities.
The right to be wrong is part of the firm’s culture. Contributions are
recognized via rewards.
Some observers reject these horizontal or cellular models as a fashionable
phenomenon1. On our part, the authors believe it is part of a real revolution.
According to Salim Ismail et al. (2014), Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb,

Google and Instagram are exponential organizations (ExO), as they have
been able to convert available information into competitive advantage by
exploiting the network effect and the acceleration associated with this effect
to create a “disruptive” model. This analytical matrix is based on the
opposition between linear and exponential structures. While the world of
information develops exponentially, our organizational structures are still
linear. They are therefore inadequate. These exponential organizations rest
on the six Ds defined by Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler (2012)
(Digitalized/Deceptive/Disruptive/Dematerialized/Demonetized/Democratiz
ed). Digitalization allows rapid spread.
Afterwards, there is deception because growth is virtually invisible. Then,
disruption creates a new market and thus overturns what already exists.
Demonetization tends to remove money from services and products, and
dematerialization tends to remove the services and products themselves.
Video camera, video game, dictaphone, calculator, clock… all these
applications have been dematerialized and become free of charge when they
once had a significant cost. Even if the applications mentioned above have
become free of charge, it is necessary to pay the price of the smartphones in
which they have been integrated. Democratization takes place when prices
become low enough that they become accessible and affordable to the
greatest number.
These exponential organizations are also sometimes called “unicorns”, a
term created by Aileen Lee in 2013 to insist on the link to dreams, magic,
sympathy and power. The author has re-used the term “unicorn” to describe
these new technological firms which have reached values of at least a
billion dollars. This very small circle included, at the end of 2016,
179 companies in total worldwide. This exponential vision was theorized by
1 Collectif des MECREANTS. (2015). Entreprise libérée – La fin de l’illusion.

Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution

7

Ray Kurzweil (2005), chief engineer of Google, based on Moore’s law stated
in 1965, according to which the power of processors doubles every
18 months.
According to Kurzweil (2005), many people think about the future
linearly. They think that they are going to continue to deal with problems by
using the tools and progress of today and do not take into account the
exponential growth of technologies. Evolutionary processes such as
technology accelerate. They function through interaction and create a
capacity, then they use this capacity to pass on to the next stage.
In other words, the results of faster computers are used to build even
faster computers.
Some traditional firms such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola are
moving towards this type of exponential organization. For Salim Ismail et al.
(2014), this evolution is based on a transformation of leadership and the
progressive integration of principles. In fact, to transform organizations, it is
first necessary to transform employees and in particular, managers.
Leadership must thus change paradigm.
Faced with the crisis of traditional models of leadership, the approach of
the positive leader seems to constitute an interesting alternative. A positive
leader fits into a different paradigm, that of transformation, starting from the
inversion of the pyramid. It involves serving the area of value creation.
In fact, the positive leader aims to transform themselves in order to better
transform their organization (Frimousse et al. 2017).
Following this, they should struggle at the same time against the forces
of resistance while modifying the firm’s culture in a significant way.
Human transformation is the indispensable complement to the digitalization

of the company.
In reality, the best-performing organizations apply the ambidextrous
management developed by Tushma and O’Reilly (2016). They do not
counterpose directive management to team autonomy. They implement both
at the same time. The best-functioning organizations are total democracies
led by attentive directors. The GAFA companies are known to have at their
heads directive and authoritative leaders, but the high level of transparency
limits the levels of vertical interaction and allows a very strong delegation of
power to teams.


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

1.2. New and fundamental insights
All these approaches involve power-sharing, accountability, continuous
improvement, decision-making autonomy, personal and collective
recognition, agility, innovative behaviors, the right to make errors and the
quality of interpersonal relationships. But, do they actually entail new
managerial realities? In fact, these concepts are inspired by and draw from
different theoretical and philosophical undercurrents, as well as the
contributions of certain management gurus.
First of all, let us cite the human relations schools, in particular
Mc Gregor (1971) and Theory X. Here, collaborators prefer to be directed so
as to avoid responsibilities. In this case, the solution is the hierarchical
organizational model. In “Theory Y”, human beings aspire to satisfy their
universal needs for self-realization and self-direction. An organization must
therefore meet these needs in a manner appropriate to their cultural and
human context, by offering an appropriate mode of organization. This

involves co-construction with employees of a unique mode of organization.
Next, as to the critique of Taylorist organization, let us cite Hannah Arendt
(1958), Georges Friedmann (1956) and Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1929), who was
the first theoretician of autonomous work teams. More recently, the
sociologist François Dupuy (2013, 2016) studied the failures of Taylorist
management applied to 21st-Century organizations.
At the level of managerial theories, we find the systemic principles that
Peter Senge (1991) has put forward under the name of The Fifth Discipline.
The same goes for Deci and Ryan’s (1985) theory of self-determination.
Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker (1996) and their distinctions between
mechanistic and organic organizations are also a source for these new
concepts. Mechanistic firms are made up of rules, procedures, operating
modes, organizational charts and job descriptions. Here, organization is
understood as a mechanical machine built from assembled gears.
In contrast, organic organizations are understood as a living organism
comprised of organs and of molecules in perpetual motion, producing what
Jean-Daniel Reynaud (1989) calls autonomous regulation, referring to the
rules that the members of a group spontaneously give themselves. The
mechanistic logic’s control regulation designates rules defined by a third
party, in particular by leaderships and managers, to prescribe behaviors.


Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution

9

Let us also emphasize the contributions of such great management gurus
and practitioners as Tom Peters (1992) with his book Liberation
Management, or Edward Deming (1982) with quality circles. Jeff Sutherland
and Ken Schwaber (2014) – the inventors of the agile method – have shown

that developers who no longer work in the framework of tasks but in that of
goals perform better. General Stanley McChrystal (2015) describes how it
became necessary for him to profoundly modify the chain of command
when, operating in Iraq in the years 2002–2008, he realized that his army
was no longer waging a conventional war against a traditional army, but that
its opponent was a guerrilla movement structured into several militias. He
describes his new approach as a network of teams, with a high degree of
autonomy and a high level of communication.
At the philosophical level, Mounier’s (1936) personalism is also a source
for the principles that are being mobilized. With regard to intellectuals, the
reflections of Georges Archier and Hervé Sérieyx in the book The Type 3
Company (1994), the “intelligent firm” described by Hubert Landier (1991),
and Edgar Morin (1990) on complex thought should also be cited
as references.
We thus understand that the renewal of organizational models is an old
question and that many theoreticians, thinkers and practitioners have made
concrete proposals in this regard. Are current attempts at modelization
therefore nothing but old recommendations repackaged for today’s tastes
through clever marketing work?
Actually, no. What is really convergent and innovative is the fact that
these modelizations fit into a new context corresponding to the convergence
of managerial ideas, anthropological evolution and a technological
earthquake named digitalization, which marks a real rupture. Why did
Google succeed in escaping from the design process much more quickly than
the average company? Why does Airbnb have more offers per employee
than its competitors? In fact, the growth of these companies does not stem
from technology in itself, but from the way in which they are organized.
Technology is, at the same time, a point of support and a lever of action. All
of the firms mentioned have shown their capacity to take advantage of the
dramatic acceleration of technology, which promotes, at the organizational

level, moving from the pyramid model to the platform model, particularly
with the principles of the blockchain. These models provide fundamental


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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

insights into aspects of the revolution in the environment of today’s firms
and certainly those of tomorrow.
1.3. From pyramid to platform
The exponential rhythms of the development of technologies and changes
in the environment lead to the appearance of an organization structured as a
network of teams and, by means of an open and collaborative platform,
allowing the exchange of data between different stakeholders. At Facebook,
employees all work together in an immense open space. Mark Zuckerberg
himself does not have his own office, moving from station to station
depending on which project he is working on. Young technological
enterprises often feature an internal culture which promotes experimentation
and risk-taking, and does not penalize failure. All this comes with a great
deal of autonomy and little hierarchy.
Exponential firms are platforms, that is, interactions with stakeholders
allow them to fulfill their missions. Jean Louis Beffa speaks of
platformization and of the capacity to pivot (2017). The platform is
orientated, in turn, towards clients, suppliers, partners and employees. It
involves allying with the multitude, with billions of educated, equipped and
connected individuals, and inviting them into the company’s value chain
(Colin and Verdier 2015). The Internet of Things multiplies points of contact
with individuals and intensifies the collection of their personal data, allowing
the firm to anticipate their needs. The platform gives information and advice.

It sells the firm’s goods and/or services, while ensuring their quality. It is
concerned with attracting talent and developing the employer’s brand. The
platform especially allows a hyper-customized offer of service for the largest
number within and outside of the firm. It is a powerful digital instrument
panel. Teams can access real-time data on the use of the products and
services offered (Simon 2011).
HR departments may, in particular, measure the impact of a new training
module on employee performance. The data collected allow them to obtain
all the segmentations and information necessary for a product launch. Data
which were exploited little in traditional pyramidal organizations will thus
be better used to create new forms of intelligence. Digital technology
changes and breaks traditional hierarchical systems. Take the example of
blockchain technology, the users of which say that it increases meritocracy