Did this model work?
Yes, it did.
Essentially for the next four or
five years, Oticon was, was really very successful.
Launching a whole stream of new projects, products smaller, smaller hearing aids,
digital hearing aids, and so
forth, that helped the company to compete at a very high level using this new model.
But actually the story doesn't finish there.
Because it turns out there was this new model, this bottom up model, this so
called spaghetti organization model had enormous benefits.
It also had some weaknesses.
Some teams found themselves doing overlapping things.
So teams found themselves moving into
projects which actually weren't that good of an idea.
And they weren't very good at killing off dead projects dying projects.
So.
Gradually over that period,
they reinstituted some of the more traditional top-down reviews.
And Lars Kolind himself retired in the mid 90s and
was, you know, was succeeded by somebody else, who essentially helped to move
the company back a little bit, towards more of a so, shall we say, hybrid model.
So they went from extreme bureaucracy on one side
to essentially extreme emergence on the other side.
And then the pendulum swung back to a more of a middle ground.
And throughout the late 90s and early noughties they occupied a, a, a space,
a manage, management-wise, which was a much more of a kind of
hybrid between the principles of bureaucracy and emergence.
And is still doing very well today.
So interestingly you could argue that it was very successful to
move away from their traditional model.
But the gradually moving back towards something which is a bit halfway
in-between was ultimate, sort of the best place to be.
So there’s some interesting kind of tangents we won't get
into here about benefits of, shall we say, change for change's sake.
Suffice it to say ha Oticon is to this day actually taught in MBA programs around
the world as a good example of a company creating a more agile or adaptive form.