WASHINGTON, USA - THERE is little by way of corporate hierarchy and everyone wears several hats each.

The chief operations engineer is also a licensed neurosurgeon. Three or four staff members share cubicle space with couches and dogs - that improves information flow and saves on heating bills, apparently.

No one hesitates to skate over a corporate officer during a game of roller hockey.

This is the management culture at an American company which topped this year's Fortune magazine's list of 100 great companies to work for.

And as more and more human resources (HR) managers in the United States identify managing talent as their topmost priority, many have paid close attention to how Google, the company described above, organises itself.

Although it has a workforce of more than 19,000 in offices worldwide, Google at home - like many Silicon Valley companies - has the marked feel of a small company with very few layers of hierarchy.

With the advent of globalisation, the knowledge worker and cheaper communication technologies, the appeal of flatter organisational structures is growing, say management consultants.

With fewer layers of hierarchy come faster decision-making, which helps ease the process of collaboration - the key to globalised operations.

'In our experience, the question has been coming up a lot, especially in the last five years or so,' said Mr Chuck Scullion, a Dallas-based partner with The Boston Consulting Group, who leads the firm's organisation practice in the Americas.

'Companies are very interested in delayering, especially when they learn it shaves 20 to 30 per cent off the management cost and leaves the organisation better off,' he said.

Most companies of today were actually designed for the industrial age, said Mr Lowell Bryan, a director and senior partner at McKinsey's New York office.

Then, capital was the scarce resource, interaction costs were high and hierarchical authority and vertically integrated structures were the keys to efficient operation.

Not any more. With the 21st-century business operating offices around the world, its employees collaborating across hierarchies and departments on projects and talent becoming increasingly harder to find than capital, new complexities and challenges have emerged.

The situation is somewhat akin to pushing automobile and truck traffic through the heart of European cities whose roads were built for the horse and buggy, according to Mr Bryan.

In a book Mobilising Minds published last year, Mr Bryan and his co-author Claudia Joyce call for companies to put the same energy into designing their organisations as they do to designing new products or entering new markets.

Some innovative practices are already emerging, he said. For instance, one company has begun tying an employee's pay package to how well he collaborates with others.

An organisational structure that can attract and retain the best people is an obvious asset at a time when the demand for skilled people is rising worldwide.

A new survey of 4,700 HR managers across continents and industries by the Boston Consulting Group shows that talent management is at or very near the top of their agenda.

The survey has found some interesting variations of the theme in East Asia. When firms in Singapore talked of managing talent, they referred to high-potential employees at all levels of the organisation.

In Japan, talent management was applied selectively to senior positions in the company.

Managers in South Korea, whose firms derive substantial revenues from export markets, identified managing globalisation ahead of managing talent as their top concern.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on June 7, 2008.