 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
A staff helps an expert get all his work done. To this end, a " chief of staff" decides whether an assignment is routine or not. If it's routine, he assigns it to a staff member, who is a sort of junior expert. The chief of staff schedules the routine problems, and checks that they are completed.
If a problem is not routine, the chief of staff notices. He passes it to the expert, who solves the problem, and educates the staff -- converting the problem into a routine problem.
Staffs make decisions quickly, and carry out assignments efficiently, though less reliably than committees or matrices. For this reason businesses often prefer to use this method.
Staffs break down easily, usually from bad selection of people. Dilbert's boss is a non-expert trying to run a staff. In a "cross functional team," like an executive committee, the boss has to be a non-expert, because so many kinds of expertise are required. Also: chiefs of staff can be disorganized, play favorites, or can't tell what should go to the expert.
Executive committees can be expert staffs: at choosing people. This is how General Electric succeeded under Jack Welch. You could do worse.
On the face of it, this is the perfect organisation. One hierarchy is "functional" and assures that each type of expert in the organization is well-trained, and measured by a boss who is super-expert in the same field. The other direction is "executive" and tries to get projects completed using the experts.
Matrices are the only known organizations that can consistently create complex technical products like airplanes and engines.
The problem is that going through channels takes too long. Getting approval to actually do anything often needs the approval of each type of expert, and both of each expert's bosses! The trick is to speed aprovals: make approval everybody's number one job, and simplify sign-offs.
This organization has intense competition. Bad parts of the organization starve. Good ones get more work. Everybody is paid for what they actually do, and runs a tiny business that has to show a profit, or they get canned. For example: upper managers invest, and if they make bad investments, there's no profit. Engineers rent their designs out to manufacturing. Facilities people rent space, etc.
This is a really effective organization. But it's wasteful because all those dead pieces of organization have valuable training, and are very hard to recycle. They're bitter, and they will stop taking it after a while. Reorganization follows.
This may reflect a rather one-sided view of what goes on in ecology. It is also the case that a natural ecosystem has a natural border - ecoregions do not in general compete with one another in any way, but are very autonomous.
The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline talks about functioning as this type of organisation in this external article from The Guardian.
These try to use each of the above types of organization in the right places. Very occasionally, a true organizational genius can make this work, for a while.
Don't bet on it in the long term. Success outgrows the ability of the genius. There just get to be too many special cases.
One golden exception may be a hierarchy of staffs, where every staff above the first level works to find or make the right people. This is the G.E. model, of course.
An emerging model of organizing human endeavors, based on a blending of chaos and order (hence "chaordic"), comes out of the work of Dee Hock and the creation of the VISA financial network. Blending democracy, complex system, consensus decision making, co-operation and competition, the chaordic approach attempts to encourage organizations to evolve from the increasingly nonviable hierarchical, command-and-control models. Reference: http://www.chaordic.org.
Similarly, see Emergent organisations, and the principle of self-organization. See also group entity for an anarchist perspective on human organizations.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|