Customer-Focused Teams Coming Apart At The Seams: Towards The Coherent Matrix Organization

A danger is faced by the fictitious company, E-Markable, and by many companies in various industries. The danger is that a Customer-Focused Team will drift off to become its own largely self-contained enterprise, with a set of policies and work processes that are increasingly unique to its customer, such that fewer policies and work processes are shared among component teams of the organization. Some might ask, is this really such a bad thing? Indeed, there may be instances where a formal corporate spin-off is appropriate, if not necessary.