Successful 21st century business is guerilla warfare, outsourcing is at the heart of it, and the old integrated 'dominate, control and beat your competitors' model is a thing of the past. This was the thesis of the most popular speaker at Vanco's AGM in Barcelona last week. The secret is to employ your competitors, outsource risk, and reap the benefits of a 'disintegrated' organisation.

Professor Michael G Jacobides is associate professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, and he treated delegates to a fascinating, passionate and entertaining seminar on 21st century business models, prowling the conference floor on the lookout for anyone who might be doodling – or Googling (as indeed some were – though not for long).

Drawing apposite – if tasteless – comparisons with the West's big-budget, big-iron military campaigns of shock and awe in the East, which have been picked apart by the guerilla tactics of their opponents, Jacobides might have been offensive had he not been so amusing and gently iconoclastic.

Disintegration is happening across broad sectors of the economy, he said, and is reshaping products and services from finance to the automotive and pharmaceuticals sectors where the global division of labour is changing the competitive dynamics.

Once you start breaking organisations apart – actively 'disintegrating' the business – then new players enter the game and participate as sectors open up, bringing innovation and excellence in their wake. For Jacobides, outsourcing is at the core of the successful, disintegrated organisation.

The reason for breaking things up is that the separate parts of a large, 20th-century-style, integrated organisation – which might include its knowledge base, managerial culture, design teams, manufacturing capacity, financial structure, internal services, and so on – are not a natural fit within a large single entity, unless it is an inflexible and didactic monoculture.

The better approach is to place each task where there is the greatest cultural fit – design with a design company, services with a services company, and so on – and make the central organisation, essentially, the manager of the brand.

The impetus might be simple market dynamics, suggested Jacobides, or even regulatory pressure. “We need to shift our perception of competition from tactical to guerilla warfare,” said Jacobides. “As sectors disintegrate [by which he meant blurring the boundaries of a sector and bringing about a convergence of needs, services and products] forget niche distinctions between profit and suppliers; profit and power shifts to different parts of the value chain.”

Like many business analysts talking to an IT audience, Jacobides brought up the familiar subjects of Dell, IBM, and Apple. Dell succeeds in an unpromising sector by carrying no stock, outsourcing manufacture, and making each PC to order, he said. The old Apple, he said, was too closed, and the old IBM too open, which was why both hit the buffers of the Microsoft/Intel alliance.

The new Apple, Jacobides rightly explained, has learned the lessons of the past and created a third-party peripherals industry around the iPod and iTunes, and had outsourced all the risk of its business to companies who might previously have been its competitors. (I'd argue it still remains 'closed' via its DRM lock-in.)

This is all very well, and a solid and familiar argument, but IBM is a much more agile and nimble company than people give it credit for – today's services giant (Big Spectrum?) bears little comparison with the Big Blue of old – while Dell is not the success story it once was.

That said, Jacobides' appraisal of 21st century business remains largely on the money: it is no longer about margin but about strategic business model redesign: manage the value chain, rather than own it. A bullish message for outsourcing, indeed, and perhaps one with an implicit warning to the US: close your doors to global sourcing at your peril.

If Jacobides' thesis is correct, then outsourcing is the underlying support structure of many successful 21st century businesses. It is not a threat to jobs, but actively supporting them.