Boundarylessness and LIW

From a recent discussion with Andy Walmsley, who used to work at GE, and introduced me to the workout concept. It has a bearing on LIW mentioned earlier.

In conjunction with Workout, Jack Welch introduced the concept of “Boundarylessness” whilst reorganising GE in the 1980s. It’s a cumbersome word but it became part of the GE core values as the organisation adapted itself to a changing business environment during the 80s and the 90s. Over time, many other organisations adopted a lot of GE’s management and communications practices after seeing how successful they were. Boundarylessness involved a fundamental change in the way that communication was carried out at all levels in GE. A very interesting (and also pleasingly succinct) paper on the subject can be found here.

This seems to relate to the U.S. Army adopting GE-style management practices (therefore, dare I say that such practices can work in a public sector organisation).