Like politicians and electrical engineers, business people are calling into question the organizational forms and structures that have produced so many success stories in the Industrial Age. In particular, the hierarchical organization forms of giants such as Digital, IBM, and General Motors seem to have lost their ability to successfully organize and coordinate work between large numbers of people, while at the same time allowing adaptation to new market conditions. As a result, long held beliefs of proper organizational design and structure are being called into question. In fact, newer industries such as the software industry seem to be following a new paradigm all together---a paradigm that combines cooperation and competition in a way that befuddles the hierarchical giants.

This thesis examines successful, innovative forms of corporate structure in order to identify key characteristics and requirements of these new forms of organizations. Once these have been identified, they may be useful in creating new or modifying existing corporate or organizational structures in order to deal with the accelerating pace of change.

The study itself seems somewhat of a paradox. How can one study an innovative form of corporate structure, yet claim that this structure is a success? One would think that if a corporate structure was truly innovative, it would also be nascent, and unproved. However, there are some well-established organizations who have innovated in their structure as a result of the unusual demands of their environments. I have chosen to concentrate my analysis on two organizations that have each existed for over twenty-five years, growing to unbelievable size and quietly changing the world as they did so.

The Internet
It is impossible to open a journal these days without being confronted with an article about the use and growth of the Internet. While it is true that the Internet is not a corporation, it nonetheless has an organizational structure that provides for coordination and decision making without central authority. The structure by which this interconnected network manages coordination between its distributed parts can provide valuable insights about how to structure a decentralized corporation or organization.

Visa International
Visa International is a corporation that is wholly owned by the member institutions that issue credit cards under its name. It was purposely architected to distribute power, authority and control to the peripheral components of its structure; it was also intentionally to evolve and adapt as its environment changed locally or globally. I will examine the seemingly unique characteristics of Visa's industry that generated its structure, and then identify how Visa was structured to respond to these demands.

In order to perform this analysis, I am using the concepts and tools developed as part of the Process Handbook Project at the Center for Coordination Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management. By using the process handbook methodology and other organizational and interdisciplinary theory to represent, describe, and explain the success of the governance process of both the Internet and Visa International, I will identify the key characteristics and requirements in common with these two organizations, as well as some important differences that arise from each organization's unique environment and context.

I will try to extrapolate general characteristics of these centralized organizations to describe the generic case of a decentralized organization, and conclude by suggesting how decentralized organizations can best be designed. I also propose that there are numerous organizational successes and failures that can be analyzed and understood via these same characteristics and requirements. This thesis concentrates on the high level corporate structures of the Internet and Visa International rather than analysis of internal procedures. I believe that there is ample room for more cross-industry research, as well as room for intra-organizational research.