A war is raging between two different corporate models.

The basic assumptions of the effective operation of most of today’s largest corporations are largely founded on the thinking of Milton Friedman back in the 1970. Corporations should only exist to create profit to shareholders though operation inside the frame of the law. Later years has modulated the goal from profit to value, from shareholders to stakeholders and increased the scope from within the law also to include ethical CSR related goals also. But the corporate communication does not reveal this change; most corporate communication is still focused on quarterly profits and not on long term potential goals that could provide benefits to a larger group of stakeholders. The profits made are mainly used to invest in own equity, return to shareholders and to acquire competitors in the industry with the aim to become larger and more cost efficient.

It is almost like large corporate dinosaurs happily grassing on the fat fields of loyal or locked customers feeling secure in their sheer size and power. But something is changing. New nimble companies with very different thinking based on different assumptions are not only challenging the dinosaur corporations – they are starting to kill them. Maybe the rules are changing, maybe the meteor has already struck and the grass is withering.

Companies like Netflix, Tesla, AirBnB, Uber and a lot others are seriously disrupting existing industries fast. The size of nimble companies like Google, Amazon and Ebay suggests it is not just about being small – you can be nimble and large at the same time.

The dinosaur corporations all behave like the nimble companies will not have an impact on their business as they operate completely different. Maybe they think it will only affect certain industries or it is about technology or the internet. Maybe they are wrong, maybe it is about different thinking.

The new nimble companies are based on very different assumptions and operation of the human network called the corporation. A lot of this is based on a different model of how humans are motivated, are thinking and are acting. Most of the nimble companies have a very different relationship with their employees. They don’t call them “Our greatest strength” and then treat them like resources force fitted into boxes, grades and rankings.

They are not managed in rigid organisational structures with a very well defined boundary and strict rules for cross border activity. In nimble companies the employees are not confined by organisational structure, their networks are both external and internal to the corporation. Their roles, responsibilities and teams change according to the task and are to a high degree self-organised.

Their behavior is not dictated by monumental HR policies, described in endless documents created by legal and designed to defend the corporation against the employee.  Their Terms and Conditions are not designed to protect the corporation against the customer.

But the largest difference between the dinosaurs and the nimble organisations are in their purpose; why do they exist. The nimble organisations all have a very good idea of why they exist, what they want to achieve.

Making money as Friedman suggested is not a purpose – it is an outcome of a purpose that can engage customers, employees and other stakeholders. Engagement does not create dissatisfied shareholders.

“There can be no strategy without noble cause” Clausewitz