Seth Godin and Adriel Hampton shared bits of wisdom on their blogs this week that evangelize why organizations are doomed to change.
Seth:
Carnegie apparently said, “Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”
Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?
Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual… that’s king. In fact, shareholders demand it.
Adriel:
Imagine a near future where the central unit of government and business is not a state or municipality, not a corporation, but the individual or a decentralized coalition of individuals.
That’s not to say that the traditional institutions will disappear, but they will become increasingly less powerful.
Think about it financially, for instance. How many business and government organizations are asking their consumers and constituents to slash their budgets? Few, if any. With money comes power, and with power comes greed. For the same reason that your salesman should be responsible for product design, how about turning over the keys to your financial coffer to the people who truly own you — the people who elect, appoint, or otherwise pay your way into office.
I challenge you to give up control, turn proprietary information on its head, and stop meeting behind closed doors. I encourage you to shake things up.
The model of enterprise is changing — whether you’re a business division or a government agency. You can look and act like everyone else, or you can be unique. Ask tough questions, be a person, and don’t accept the status quo because it’s always been that way… because you know what? It hasn’t.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
A Business and Government always needed because people should be organize and follow a common rule. When people follow some common rule, they automatically create and organization. Sometime we name that organization Government, sometime Business, sometime society but the fact is same. However, as the infrastructure changing, the power may be shift little bit but the over all concept will remain.
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Thanks for the shout out. My thoughts there are pretty loosely formed; I added a comment response explaining a little more about what I was getting at.
Business aren’t going to flip the flow anytime soon. There’s too much call for assets that shareholders can sell. People don’t fall into that category.
Sure, big business talks about how their employees are their #1 asset, yet those same people are often the first to go instead of selling the factory the company is losing billions on.
The same holds true for government. Information isn’t freely accessible for the voting populace to review, or if it is, it’s intentionally difficult to interpret. Sure, i’d love to see how every dollar gets spent but ultimately I’d end up with allotment #s instead of actual dollars.
On a small scale, I’m not sure how flipping things helps a small business owner.
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