On 28 Oct 99, at 7:21, Brian Gordon wrote:
> Malcolm Burson hit upon a point of personal fascination for me when he
> quoted Peter Drucker as saying:
>
> > "Hierarchy," and the unquestioning acceptance of it by everyone in
> > the organization, is the only hope in a crisis.
>
> This view seems to be commonly accepted in our culture, but I don't
> believe it. It assumes that the military/church/nobility/etc. model is
> the only one capable of producing leadership in a crisis situation, yet
> today we are putting together self-directed teams because they react more
> quickly and more correctly in a crisis.
I do believe it, but I also "believe" your comments are true, also. It
seems to me that the size of an organization is critical here.
> Firstly, in any given situation, high-performance teams rotate the
> leadership, not by vote or some formal system, but according to the
> demands of the situation. For example, a fire may occasion the person
> closest to it taking a leadership role, or the person who's a volunteer
> fire-fighter, or whoever is most appropriate given the team's make-up.
I think this works in smaller groups, and even organizations, but I'm not
sure we've actually got good tests of the idea in larger organizations.
It's hard to imagine IBM, or HP or another large company functioning as a
self-directed team with the CEO rotating. It is, however, easy to imagine
a design team at one of those facilities operating efficiently in crisis.
If there is such an organization of say, 40,000 people operating as a
self-directed team, and working well in crisis, I'd certainly like to hear
about it, and how they are accomplishing it.
> Secondly, members of many high-performance teams have said that there were
> numerous situations in which they all just "knew" what to do. There was
> no need of an individual leader or chain-of-command. Everyone on the team
> was in synch and moved as one.
>
> I think that statements like Drucker's only encourage control-oriented
> managers to hang on to power.
My guess is that Drucker wasn't talking about little organizations, but
large one. I think he is correct in that context. Paradoxically the
opposite of what he says may ALSO be true. Hierarchy that is too rigid and
slow, will slow an organization down so it cannot react fast enough to a
crisis.
The moral of the message: It isn't possible to blanket statement about
hierarchy without specifying the context, and more importantly, what kind
of hierarchy, we are talking about.
Anyone know the context of Drucker's remarks?
Visit the Business & Mgmt. Bookshelf - summaries of best books in HR, interviewing, leadership, motivation, training activities
, and a number of other categories.
Save time and money while finding the best books.
http://members.xoom.com/topbooks
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>