The strategy of the producers

I wasn't alone in the strategy of employing a virtual team to keep up with the changing fashions. The wholesalers were also using this same strategy to acquire products from their manufacturing contacts. Like me, they had access to a number of sources of costume jewellery supply - the manufacturers - who were in various states of readiness. They could shop around these sources to obtain what the market demanded at any particular time.

By using various combinations of different manufacturers on demand, the wholesalers had a virtual manufacturing capability that could flexible respond to the rapidly changing demands of fashion. It carried no over heads and didn't involve any people problems. This allowed the wholesale operations to be run as small, proprietary enterprises, mostly family concerns. Despite their small size they had vast turnovers that would be the envy of many larger organisations

The most vulnerable, to changing trends and fashions, were the core businesses of the costume jewellery manufacturers. They didn't have quite the same scope for flexibility as the retailers and the wholesalers because their businesses relied upon expert craft workers and speciality plant and equipment. They were forced to work as permanent managed teams with the associated needs of having to keep people happy and motivating them.

However, the constant ebb and flow of the changing fashions and the irregular demands on their products made it impractical for costume jewellery manufacturers to extend the principle of managed teams too far. Of necessity, they had to keep their core business as small as possible, because the changing fashions could see them working at full stretch for a few months and then to find the business dropping off to practically nothing. They couldn't afford to keep on permanent large team in such conditions because the overheads would kill them off in the quiet spells.

To keep their overheads down to a minimum and yet still be able to take advantage of the rushes when they came, the manufacturer's had to have a very flexible employment strategy. Usually this involved concentrating their manufacturing capability around a narrow but essential niche speciality and making use of other speciality workshops to carry out parts of the work they weren't equipped to do themselves.

They would also maintain contact with a host of out workers who could be employed temporarily, on demand, to work at home on repetitive tasks that required little training. In this way, the manufacturing companies could work with a very small permanent team, keep overheads to a minimum, and yet still retain a capacity to expand production at a moment's notice.

Fitting into this pattern of business, many of the manufacturers used their quiet times to develop new products or explore new techniques and methods of working. This enabled them to be in a good position to benefit from the next emerging fashion trend when it came along.

Looking at the structure of these highly adaptable manufacturing concerns would see the main framework as being a communication network driven by information. Manufacturers would be like central hubs, communication linked to a range of complementary manufacturing facilities and a number of wholesalers. They can be seen as systems that are being fed by information flowing from the customers: via, the retailers and the wholesalers.

Such systems have direct parallels in e-commerce and e-business. Many middlemen interpret customer demands and organise technology to satisfy them. This invariably involves a chaotic and continuous redeployment of effort and resources as competition and technological changes keep moving the goal posts.

Prime technological developers and contractors are very vulnerable to the changing technological trends. They can easily expand on the basis of being expert in one particular area of technology only to see the business fall away rapidly as this technology is superseded by something better.

Just like the costume jewellery manufacturers, the more sensible prime contractors and producers maintain a relatively small staff of communicators, who keep in regular contact with pools of different kinds of experts and specialists. These experts, working from home or in small studios situated perhaps anywhere in the world, can be quickly assembled into a virtual team when the need arises. This is the only way that rapidly changing technology and competition can be successfully handled in the chaotic environment of e-business and e-commerce.

The need for teams to be created on the fly for temporary periods make it impossible to apply the Industrial Age concepts of organisation and managed teams. It is far more efficient to use object oriented methods of organisation, where virtual team members can be treated as objects. These people objects can be given messages to which they respond by carrying out appropriate functions to satisfy the system requirements.

To the mind of an Industrial Age thinker, this scenario will seem cold and heartless; a robotic system that has no considerations for human emotions. But, is it? The various businesses that have evolved to cope with the similar continuously changing environment of the fashion industry are run in just this way. But, they are not noted for their cold robotic atmospheres.