MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Why Companies Must Embrace Microservices and Modular Thinking

Companies that embrace remote work — which is here to stay — can also drastically reduce their coordination costs through modular organization. Spotify announced earlier this year that it would completely shift to remote work. Salesforce expects its workers to be in the office just one to three days a week. Last fall, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he believed the company would not return to the way people worked pre-pandemic, noting, “There are some things that actually work really well virtually.” Ping An — China’s largest insurer — took its remote work one step further: It developed a suite of tools that lets its 1.4 million employees and agents work remotely. It’s now offering those same tools to other financial service companies.

About the Author

Mark J. Greeven is a professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland and the author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs (MIT Press, 2019).

Howard Yu is the author of Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (PublicAffairs, 2018), the Lego Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School in Switzerland, and director of IMD’s Advanced Management Program.

Jialu Shan is a research fellow at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, a joint initiative of IMD Business School and Cisco.

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