Beyond the bull—t.

There are so many organization and management fads out there that you can virtually drown in a sea of verbiage, or even get a case of mild indigestion from overdosing on slogans.

The goal of this post is to provide 5 organizational principles which apply to most types of organizations and cut through all the fashion-based repackaging of the basics.

  1. You cannot define away complexity. If your organization is complex, as most organizations are, the complexity will not disappear by only defining roles, responsibilities and processes. Definitions help, but only up to point.
  2. Distance breeds mistrust. One can use Whatsapp, Snap chat, Skype or the most sophisticated of tools. But distance breeds anxiety, lack of trust and deep control based issues. Mistrust occurs at close range as well, but it always appears in a fiercer form when you factor in distance.
  3. Staffing is strategic. Bad hires cause phenomenal pain which cannot be mitigated by coaching, management development or change management plans.
  4. Business processes do not replace common sense.
  5. Over reliance on IT systems dumbs. The dumbness does not appear immediately, but develops over time. If one does not deal with this dumbing, you end up with great IT systems and a bunch of stupid behaviours, like no accountability, and 120 emails on every issue.
Share Button

10 thoughts on “Beyond the bull—t.

  1. Allon, your candor outruns the pace at which truth is consumed. A bad hire, may be a bad hire. However, if one assumes staffing is strategic, what makes it accurate anyway? In my experience, specifying criteria for role effectiveness is the start point. My gut feel is that it may have a share variance of between 60 to 80 per cent in the quality of hire placed on the job. The numbing of native innate intellect was unleashed since the advent of MRP-II systems in manufacturing organizations in the 1980s. ERP took over the mindshare of those responsible for business. Now, these systems have a mind of their own, that business owners cannot converse with. So numb and dumb. Good of you to lay it in bare, essential and pithy manner, as is your style now.

  2. Again, you nailed it.
    Your third point is most apparent in bureaucracies where procedurized staffing leads to bad appointments. The then only “procedure” available to them is structural change in the hope of creating a position that will mitigate the negative effects of the original bad decision.
    Levis

  3. And to build on that, one of my late father’s (z”l) favorite sayings:
    No matter how carefully you try to idiot proof it, there will always be a bigger and better idiot.

  4. Hi Allon
    There is nothing like reality… something missing in most organizations and in the minds of leaders everywhere…

    … and don’t get me started on ‘change management’ … a contradiction of terms if there ever was one… the terms ‘ludicrous’ and ‘farcical’ comes to mind….

    All the best…

Leave a Reply to Fred Nickols Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.