Ed Brenegar wrote:
> We are not born to be alone, but to be in community. We seek it, yet are
> repulse by it because it requires what we fear most, that our true selves
> be discovered and than I not be what I claim to be, or that I find out
> that I'm not what I want to be. Organizations are tough because people
> take them personally. We have high expectations for what they should do
> for us, and when they don't, then we become frustrated.
Ed and I will never agree: different generations, different lives,
different worlds. Collective structures such as organizations have nothing
to do with revealing our true selves- on the contrary, it is impossible to
find our true selves in an organization- because the excessive structure
(job procedures, reporting relationships, task setting and so on) prevents
effective learning. An individual can never overcome organizational debris
such as politics, cultire, offices and hierarchy sufficiently to explore
let alone reach their full potential within an organization. They stay
because they do not realize that there are viable alternatives- more
dynamic forms of organizations such as collapsible corporations.
It is the very fact that organizatiions do not take their members
personally that makes them sub-optimal learning and working and
collaboration environments. We treat everyone the same, put that struture
around them, treat them as rankers- interchangeable units of economic
production with jobs dumbed down to the lowest common denominator that
anyone can learn in six weeks, and then rarely learn again.
I have just been considering the essence of customer service problems and
the need for micro-management- why these things occur in organizations-
and it comes down to the same things- lack of self-confidence on the part
of organization actors- managers to delegate and "subordinates" to leave-
and the need for managers to set procedures and intervene to forcibly
encourage people to meet customer service requests when they don't have
the inherent market-conferred incentive to. In other words,
micro-management and the need for customer service arise because people in
companies are not living their personal dreams.
Static organizations are an outmoded historic anomoly no longer relevant
in the unorganized world. Because such structures are not responsive
enough, leaders either give the structure away voluntarily or the market
takes it away by force. Either way, in the future, people will not work in
the ways they did in the past- and rightly and thankfully so.
regards sincerely simon buckingham
http://www.unorg.com
unorganization: bsuiness not busyness!
--Simon Buckingham <go57@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>