Edwin Brenegar III <brenegar@bulldog.unca.edu> has elaborated very well a
vision of an organization transformed into a community state "... But we
must pass through the exhaustion of this mindset in order to find that
community is fundamental to peace, security, and prosperity. " .....
It is a Vision, an Ideal, a Goal,...and Why not? To make it realizable
and achievable, certain fundamental characteristic differences are
examined.
Community is made up of sub-entities to a large certain
are involved in small and fairly simple work processes
that are cornerstone for basic living.
For example, a carpenter builds shed or house for a vegetable
gardener, and the gardener sell vegetable to the carpenter,
using monetary system through market place.
But in a large organization that involves sophisticated technology
and industrial processes, such independent work processes that
generate basic needs are absent, though many organizations
use Internal Customer / Supplier Relationship Model to
help to make the mainstream process that produces the
end product / service more cohesive, effective and efficient.
But each work unit in not entirely independent of their
own work to guarantee paycheck (basic living) like the
carpenter or gardener in the community. The ultimate paycheck
comes from the external customers and this paycheck need
to go through another sophitiscated process of accounting and
financial & distribution system before it lands on the
worker in a unit. Theoretically each unit or work eventually
affect all parties interest. But in real life, there are
always hiding places whereby some unit workers can shift
their burden / responsibility to others. But not in the
case of the community i.e. if the carpenter go hiding and
enjoys fishing somewhere instead of building the shed
for the farmer, he wouldn't get pay.
Hence much creativity with experiments are required to change the mode of
production into community type of mechanisms. In this like, some
organization goes for outsourcing i.e. certain units of work are taken out
to individual group of enterprise or business companies to handle. But
whether it is traditional work units, or small, medium businesses /
enterprises, the ultimate paycheck is still dependent on the external
customers who buy products as a result of long and sophisticated
production process. Whereas in the case of community, there is much
flexibility e.g. individual entities can do trading in many different
fields with the outside environment, unless that community solely depends
on one product or service e.g. the livelihood of the community depends
entirely on coal mine. The whole livelihood can be threatened if there is
slum in coal mine market.
Any other thoughts.
Andrew Wong
Organization Observer and Thinker
Homepage http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5621
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>