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Introduction Unit of One  Fast Co. Zines   Check out Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber's trailblazer page Read other interviews Ways to Give Back Edited by Anna Muoio Today business is about more than just making products - or money. It's about making a difference. So Fast Company invited 19 business leaders to share their insights on giving back to the community. Their stories reveal areas in which people are contributing today - education, technology, environment, health, community development - as well as shared beliefs about the new philanthropy: Giving time is more important than just giving money. Personal commitment matters more than corporate involvement. And action, as always, counts for more than mere words. Jay Backstrand President Impact Online Palo Alto, California jay@impactonline.org The large, centrally controlled enterprise is a thing of the past. Most of these new big mergers look, smell, and feel like the old-world style. To some degree, they're being driven by the cheap price of capital. This might make a lot of them doable, but that doesn't mean they're sensible. Sure, a group of five people can put two companies together. But can a merged organization of 100,000 people actually work? There's an inherent problem with size. When innovative small companies start succeeding, they can get big - and risk becoming un-innovative. But not all big companies are lumbering behemoths. So the question is, How do you create really innovative, nimble, fast, big companies? A good example of big and nimble is Shell Oil. In the early 1990s, U.S. Shell went through a huge financial crisis. But it came out the other side with a commitment to some fundamental rethinking. In 1994, Shell established a new governance system to shake things up. The company turned its exploration and production divisions - as well as its marketing, distribution, and sales departments into separate businesses. Then it even went so far as to turn all of its internal services - legal, accounting, IT - into separate businesses. Originally, these divisions had been like wards of the state. They had never had to fend for themselves. It was a brutal restructuring process - but it's been so successful that Shell is implementing the new structure worldwide. Here's the point: A crisis made Shell realize that how it was organized as a big company was completely inconsistent with what it cared about. But let's take a look at the other side: Imagine that bigger is better. What would that big organization look like? Shell is one of the largest corporations in the world. But even as the oil company grows and evolves, it keeps looking more and more like a nimble network. Peter Senge (psenge@mit.edu) is chairman of the Society for Organizational Learning, a consortium of corporations working together to advance methods and knowledge for building learning organizations. Senge is also the author of the best-seller, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday/Currency, 1990). Back to Unit of One Copyright © 1999 Fast Company. All Rights Reserved.     Decision Making Your Boss Your Career New Ideas Is Bigger Better?

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