A great sadness

As I get to see more and more organisations I sometimes get overwhelmed by a feeling I can only describe as melancholy at the number of clever, well meaning people in business who spend their working lives making it harder to get things done

Comments

[andrew]

I've come to realise that the inhuman (not being perjorative) scale of large organisations dictates a quite different set of operating parameters. They just wouldn't hang together if they operated like a 3-person collective. So yes, you go past this threshold where suddenly you have 10% of the operating efficiency. But I submit that's how it has to be, more or less. The trick then is to remain below that critical size.

So says I.

[andy]

Clever, well-meaning people often have some bizarre underlying assumptions that colour their every thought and action, without them ever realising it. Like the guy I once worked for who told me, quite sincerely, that business, like life, is a war and if you want to succeed you have to adopt the tactics of war. What a waste of good intention - because, in spite of his horribly twisted view of humanity, I believe he genuinely thought he was working for good in the best way he could.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

[Jon Husband]

Once upon a time I was sad, when I did a lot of organizational development work ... sad enough to visit a psychiatrist because I was worried about depression. He seemed to me to be quite wise, one of those philosophically-oriented shrinks.

He listened to me whine for a while, and then said "Aahh, I think I see ... you are trying to do, or want to do, work that is pro-life, humanistic. Most organizations are basically anti-human, more or less like machines. That's probably a fundamental source of the dissonance you seem to be feeling."

[Alexander Kjerulf]

Euan, I feel your sadness. And so does Lars Kolind, the celebrated danish business leader who just wrote The Second Cycle, which is all about letting people make things easier rather than harder by once and for all curbing bureaucracy. More here:
http://www.thesecondcycle.com

[Euan Semple]

Excellent - thanks for the tip. Added to my book list.

[ant miller]

I think it's a factor of the 'establishment' of an organisation- the ossified, calcified core of career place holders and greasy pole climbers. Ignore them, run arond the outside, treat every 'no exit' sign as an obvious admission that there is a door there, and you can get things done. The war thing isn't that unhealthy an approach either- just be a guerilla!

[Jon Husband]

If you're a guerilla you usually have to wear pretty darned good camouflage ... and if and when you get discovered, you usually get killed pretty quickly.

The kind of camouflage you have to wear in most types of organization usually has some impact on who you are and how you be outside of the organization, in my experience

[Michael Walsh]

Euan,

Most people want to "just follow orders" in corporations/big businesses. This absolves them of the need to take responsibility. The thing to remember when dealing with the "good people who make things harder" is they will easily adjust their mindset and effort to the new corporate dictat at a whim. The trick is in getting high enough up the ladder to influence the agenda setters.

The "good people" may well recognise the opportunities you lay in front of them and may well see the benefits to their daily working lives of implementing some of the ideas you may float past them. Their corporate nature and reward scheme though, naturally makes them risk-averse.

I see it as my role in an organisation to try and pester the agenda setters into doing the right thing, thus enabling the "good people" to be true to their personal nature as opposed to the corporate one.

Keep chipping away at the mountain - someday it will be nothing but sand :-)