Power to the Edge

Power to the edge is about changing the way individuals, organizations, and systems relate to one another and work.

• empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organization
• adoption of an edge organization, with greatly enhanced peer-to-peer interactions.
• moving senior personnel into roles that place them at the edge

Power to the edge is being presented in the military domain as the correct response to increased uncertainty, volatility, and complexity. Clearly these factors also apply to civilian enterprises, both commercial and public sector.

Military use of the term comes from a book by David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes, of the US Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program (DoD CCRP). See also presentation material by Dr Margaret Myers.

Groove (acquired by Microsoft in March 2005) always liked this concept – see blogs by Ray Ozzie and Michael Helfrich. See also blogs by Doug Simpson and Nathan Wallace.

Philip Boxer and I wrote a couple of articles for the Microsoft Architecture Journal on the implications for Service Oriented Architecture. Philip and Carole Eigen also applied the concept to the psychoanalytic study of organizations.

I found a weblog rant here to the effect that Power to the Edge is all about speeding up information flow, just another name for Reengineering. In my view, this is a fundamental misunderstanding. Obviously Power to the Edge may call for improved flow of information: quality and complexity as well as quantity and speed. But Power to the Edge is not the improved flow itself but what it enables – which is a fundamental transformation in the geometry of the organization away from a hierarchical command-and-control structure. And such structures are still as common in civilian/commercial organizations as in the military, if not more so.

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David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes, Power to the Edge: Command … Control … in the Information Age (CCRP June 2003) PDF version available online (1.7 MB).

Philip Boxer, Taking power to the edge by empowering the edge role (Asymmetric Leadership, 24 January 2006)

Philip Boxer and Carole Eigen, Taking power to the edge of the organisation: re-forming role as praxis (ISPSO Symposium, Baltimore, June 2005) (abstract) (presentation) (paper)

Philip Boxer and Richard Veryard, Taking Governance to the Edge (Microsoft Architecture Journal 6, August 2006)

Margaret Myers, Power to the Edge Through Net Centricity – Transformation of the Global Information Grid (CHIPS July-September 2002) Slides (pdf).

John Stenbit, Moving Power to the Edge (CHIPS July-September 2003)

Richard Veryard and Philip Boxer, Metropolis and SOA Governance: Towards the Agile Metropolis (Microsoft Architecture Journal 5, July 2005)

Wikipedia: Power to the Edge

Cross-posted to AsymmetricLeadership blog

See also Demise of the Super Star (August 2004), Governance at the Edge (August 2004) Microsoft and Groove (March 2005), Developing Data Strategy (December 2019)

Updated 7 December 2019