|
I've been writing a lot lately about broken relationships between managers and employees and why these form from a psychological basis. I now want to throw out a relatively quick word of warning: Managers are human, too!
With that being said, I want us to take a second and think about the corpus, the body of the corporation. Fundamentally, businesses operate with their own social psychologies. These tend to be similar to humans, in my observations. So, if most individuals have low self-awareness and emotional intelligence, how can we expect every company to be self-aware?
Many, if not most, companies are concerned with external factors primarily. There may be particular internal factors they do care about--such as cost, environment, and so forth; but, there is a primary disconnect between "introspection" and management. To a degree, systems thinking and Lean were built as philosophies and methodologies of forcing introspection for the corpus.
As individuals, we must work at becoming more self-aware. We must be able to identify our emotions, when and why they are spawning, and how they affect us and others. As a company, we must go through the same process of constantly evaluating what we are doing, how well we are doing it, and how important is it.
So, before you go off and get an anarchy symbol inked to your arm and task yourself with overthrowing your corporation, remember: companies are people, too.
Only through being aware of ourselves, our motivations, and our affect on other people may we truly build companies that are compassionate creatures.
About the Author
Andrew Andreas Grapsas is a game programmer at Arkadium, Inc. developing casual and social games. He previously worked at THQ and EA as a systems and gameplay programmer on triple-A shooters.
Andrew is actively writing and programming for various projects. You can read more articles exclusively at his blog aagrapsas.com.
Follow Andrew on twitter!
|
The idea that groups of people can exhibit people-like behaviors flows from the notion that living systems require certain specific internal features/functions, and that any systems containing these internal capabilities will necessarily display similar behaviors at the holistic level.
James Grier Miller summed up this line of thought in _Living Systems_, where cells and individual humans and the United Nations are all shown to express the same kinds of certain high-level behaviors because they are "living systems." Charles Handy makes, I think, a similar point when he (following Harrison) describes four different types of business cultures -- Power, Role, Task, and Person -- and implies that a company's initial culture reflects the distinctive personality style of its founder.
Closer to the point of today's comments about corporate self-awareness (a special function of sufficiently advanced living systems) is Handy's other observation about business cultures, which matches what Carroll Quigley said about civilizations: regardless of their original goal, all organizations tend over time to make self-preservation (as a Role Culture) their sole purpose unless constantly reformed. And as they cease to adapt to the changing external world, they fail.
In other words, all organizations start for and are arranged to achieve some beneficial purpose. But all organizations, over time, create internal and external constituencies that resist change; they want to preserve their benefits from and interfaces to the organization exactly as they currently exist. (This is natural -- you're getting yours, so why shouldn't you resist attempts to change that?)
To finally get to the point that links all this with today's comments, there's only one way to avoid turning into a bureaucratic zombie whose only function is self-preservation of internal forms. That is to become self-aware enough to recognize this inevitable tendency toward institutionalization... and fight it.
Organizations that don't fight inertia, that are satisfied with resting on their laurels with their existing products and services, may enjoy robber baron or monopoly status for a while. Remember the early 1980s when Novell ruled the world with their NetWare LAN product? From its energetic start when it created a great product, Novell by 1985 or so had become too invested in the connectivity status quo.
Microsoft, however, has never allowed itself to slide into institutionalization; it constantly introspects and reinvents itself as necesary to survive for the long term. And that's why after the abysmal failure of its LAN product to compete with NetWare, Microsoft won the long-term game by shifting its focus to being the best provider of interfaces to this remarkable new content-distribution system called the Internet.
Result: Microsoft is still very much an economically important organization, while Novell is now little more than a trademarked name. Given a relatively free market, reinvention will cure monopolism every time.
There's no guarantee that constant self-awareness and self-reinvention will enable a particular organization to succeed. But economic (and political) history demonstrates that failing to introspect and to use that knowledge to push back against institutionalization guarantees failure.
Great series, Andrew!
Great response, Bart! Wow, so much there. I totally agree. One of the most important elements is kaizen -- our spirit of continual improvement. Wow, yeah, I'd need an entire new blog post to respond :) Thanks for the wonderful read!