Seth Godin wrote about the Dabbawalla phenomenon in Mumbai back in April 2007. This is a low-tech organisation that delivers food to hundreds of thousands of customers a day. The magic of this operation, and the reason that big western organisations are queuing up to hear about it, is that the employees deliver the right goods to the right destination with an error rate that is the envy of just about any other delivery organisation you can name: less than one error in 6 million transactions.
The 5,000 employees in the flat organisation build customer relationships, and also use a simple colour-coding system to maximize efficiency and minimize errors; but what really appeals to me is that they use a level of technology that suits who the employees are (largely illiterate) and where they work. There's more about it on the Dabbawalla website.
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