Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Very often it happens to be just a stereotypic decision that was borrowed from the leader’s former
experience in another organization, or typical structures for this branch, etc. A businessman from
Vilnius who owned a company that faced problems purely due to mistakes in structure, refused to
even discuss the issue - because he copied the structure from a big internationally recognized
German company and was sure that ‘nobody can design anything better’. A year later he did– and
his company multiplied to several times its former sales. In another case, I was asked by two top
officials from Georgia if the structural patterns related to the internal organization of local
governments in Holland (they having just returned from a business trip) would suit Georgia – these
patterns looked so perfect… Well, at least they were smart enough to raise such a question. Many
never do; instead they merely copy others. This is dangerous, because the one, who just copies,
will never know why something was initially done in this way – so he or she cannot be critical, and
may get trapped in replicating the pattern without analyzing the reasons it worked in the prior
situation.
General trends
Facing challenges such as a changing customer base, falling prices and competition in new areas,
the old-fashioned, ‘steady as she goes’, arthritic hierarchies are struggling and declining. New,
faster-moving and innovative organizations are taking their place. Successful organizations are
looking nowadays less like efficiently functioning ‘machines’ or ‘computers’ and more like thinking
and learning organisms – ‘brains’. (N.Glass, 1998)
Although these modern models just appeared within the last thirty years, human organizations
used to follow the ‘organic’ and ‘brain’ patterns, probably, in the very distant past. Rigid divisional
structures and hierarchies appeared much later and were related to a specific and not really very
long part of human history – the age of armies and machines.
Organization is not an end in itself. It is a tool, a bit like a machine, like a computer, like a brain. In
nature – it is a tool for survival. Human organizations used to be created for specific purposes. Any
tool may fit its purpose under given conditions, or not. A primitive tool most probably will fit a
primitive purpose in primitive conditions. Primitive tools cannot be very effective, but prove to be
more universal ones.
Nowadays, when even public organizations respond to drastically changing conditions, primitive
tools can rarely be sufficient. Hierarchical bureaucracy, as a method of control, cost too much and
tends to be extremely inflexible, which often makes it useless.
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