A Cookbook?

When I was looking through the articles to see if there was anything that seemed to catch my eye at first glance, I was brought to the article by Rob Cross. UTC is the parent company of Pratt and Whitney, a company that I’ve interned at for the last 2 summers. Through the intern program, I learned the history of Pratt and UTC and the other business units that comprise the rest of the corporation.

One of the most common stories or comments that I heard was that UTC used to be nicknamed “Un-tied Technologies” because they focused too much on each separate unit, rather than look for some commonalities and shared values. When the CEO took time to look at how to improve the communication between the units he figured out how to collaborate, as the article mentioned, and subsequently improved the communication between companies. Nowadays, UTC prides itself on their diversified portfolio of products, but maintains the communication and “connected” overall company.

With the article recanting the story that I had come to hear over and over again throughout my internship, it made me think about balance. Balance in terms of collaboration and diversification. While it is important to collaborate with coworkers and create the networks, it is also necessary to have a separate identify and diversity amongst the organization and or other business units.

Balance in general is the key to any organization. Organizations need to be willing to try out different ways of managing their resources. In addition to balance, the organizations need to recognize that learning through failure is not actually failure, but rather a learning experience. Management therefore, in the new age of social networking need to be willing to balance and allow their employees time to go out and communicate and build those social networks while still maintaining a healthy balance with actual work. It may be hard to know the exact mixture or recipe of work-communicating, but is absolutely something that needs to be figured out for each company...