orgcomania

It would be very comforting to believe that "business people" or at least "corporate people" had their act together and knew what they were doing. In my experience it is common for undergraduate students to expect that when they get to their "real job" there will be leaders who lead, managers who manage, and a clear overall sense of what the organization is doing and how it is going to get where it needs to go. Sadly, the bulk of my email messages and communication from alums makes it clear to me that the "real world" is no more, and no less, organized and smoothly functioning than this unreal world of the University.

People are people and their attempts to organize are always complicated by the fact that we are not robots or automatons. People do the right thing, but they also do the wrong thing. People work hard, but they also get lazy. People act rationally, but they also act nonrationally. It is always hard to get all the necessary people on "the right page." To my thinking, this is one reason that there are so many theories of organization. Certainly our understanding of what work should be like change and theories must change accordingly. But business theory, the stuff in chapter three, has also been notoriously ineffective in predicting and controlling life in the organization (theory is supposed to allow for prediction and control). So managers and other people do their best. They invent TPS forms to try to manage a chaotic situation but somehow the form just adds to the chaos and they have to try something else. A consultant arrives with the latest theory and makes suggestions for change. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't but eventually the "people-ness" of the organization wins out and a level of chaos returns.

Think about Enron. The situation at Enron was an ethical nightmare, of course. But think about that fact that an organization of that magnitude, with facilities around the country and the world, with thousands of employees, could collapse so absolutely and so fast. It reminds us how tenuous the threads that hold organized activity together really are. I remember reading an article in the Minneapolis paper a year or two ago. I wish I remembered the name of the organization but it was a pretty good sized national organization. The organization was in trouble and the CEO was getting pressured to resign or get fired. At the heart of the problem was that he had hired his girlfriend to be the CFO (chief financial officer). She was in over her head and had caused a number of problems. I remember thinking that it was incredible to me that a big Fortune 500-ish company could be seriously brought down because the CEO hired his girlfriend. It sounded like the thing that might happen in a little two or three person organization or even in a club in high school. But in a major organization with hundreds of employees. I was amazed! But as I said, people are people and putting them in high powered organizational contexts does not change that.

All this is not say that we shouldn't learn theory of course. There are many valuable tools in chapter three. It is only to serve a reminder that whatever theory you may use those are people out there and as Depeche Mode says "people are people..."

--Rick