Replying to LO28931 --
Dear At and fellow Organlearners,
Thank you very much for your response At. I always find your contributions
intellectually stimulating as I can equate your discussion approach to
experiences which I have encountered during my working career including a
five year stint teaching Management and Marketing at several Australian
Universities.
Your response to my modelling suggestion was to give me an opportunity of
exploring other ways in which a model could be built and I thank you for
your further explanation and the use of the Cancer metaphor. We often use
modelling techniques to forecast profits, the effect of increased taxes on
business activity, the impact of increases in social security payments
upon those which can bear increased living expenses the least etc.
However, I have found very little evidence of studies which have attempted
to measure the impact of Individual Competence upon the overall
Organizational Efficiency of an entity. I would welcome references or
studies which have done this.
Based on other contributions to this thread, it would appear that there is
little correlation between individual competence and organizational
efficiency. The former is driven by forces of self interest whereas the
latter is "manufactured" by organizational double speak. The number of
global corporate failures and pending failures speak for themselves. You
only have to read the glowing Annual reports of how well an organization
is performing only to find a few months later that Company XYZ is facing
one of the biggest Bankruptcies that the State, County, Country etc. has
seen this decade etc.
My point in relation to "Not until we can equitably reward those ..." was
referring to whatever reward system an organization engages. Some of you
may be familiar with Abraham Maslow and how individuals respond to rewards
according to their own situation and needs. If people are driven by money,
then offer them a reward system based on money or in the case of your
example of Peter, self actualization may be more important than external
drivers.
Finding peace with oneself after helping out your team to achieve the
highest sales total for the month, could be the only reward that an
individual would desire for this particular event. Probably because we do
not live in a perfect world, we cannot reward those who deserve it the
most. Why? Because reward systems are based upon artificial constructs
which are basically flawed due to the biases built into them by those who
do not want to share the spoils equally.
In respect to my saying "may the force be with you", I am a great Star
Wars fan. I can always picture the scene when the automatic pilot is
turned off and Luke Sky Walker drops the bomb into the mother ship by pure
instinct. It is the invisible but powerful force which drives us all.
You may have a quest for knowledge, money, fame, power or whatever goal
driving you. It also may be your belief in whatever faith that you live
by.
Thus there is no specific meaning to my sign off phrase but it could be my
way of saying: "May humanity prevail so that we continue our journey of
finding and applying new knowledge to the betterment of all and not just
for a select few".
Please take care and may the force be with you.
Kind regards,
Glebe Stcherbina
Sydney, Australia
AM de Lange wrote:
> Greetings dear Glebe,
>
> I will try to do so. I made a horrible mistake by writing:
>
> > Imagine the organisation has a creativity symbolised by C(org). It can
> > be expressed by the "power law"
> > C(org) = [C(1) + C(2) + C(3) +....+ C(N-2) + C(N-1) + C(N)]^n
> > The exponent n tells how organised the individuals have become.
>
> I should have written the "It can be expressed by ..." as "IT IS AS IF
> it can be expressed by ...". You corrected that mistake by clearly
> pointing out that it is a model and nothing more.
--Glebe Stcherbina <gstc3416@mail.usyd.edu.au>
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