"Can this marriage be saved?" That's the title of the cover story in the 15th August 2005 issue of BusinessWeek (www.businessweek.com). The article describes the seven years (1998-2005) History of the merger of Daimler and Chrysler Corporation. As I write this, decided to quit the board of the merged company, the government of the current chairman, Juergen Schrempp to. At the end of this year he is with Dieter Zetsche, the current director of operations of the company, as amendedNorth America. The article mentions the following five critical challenges facing the new chairman:
1. Improve product quality and work ethic.
2. Save to win union support for flexible collective agreements.
3. Impress executives at the company, to promote more flexible and productive activities in North America.
4. Develop and implement a coherent strategy of partnership in Asia.
5. Addressing investor pressure, the dissolution of the merger.
The five challengesabove clearly show that more people with it) related problems (eg, social issues, you need to be addressed as technological issues. To embrace the new chairman must be a mixed-initiative style of leadership with a proportionate focus on both the technical and social aspects of the organization for the company to survive. This style requires some knowledge of the science of complexity (ie, the principles for the management of the organization as a complex adaptive system) and the machine metaphor(ie, the routine aspects of modern organizational life, job descriptions, corporate policy, strategic and operational plans, etc.) *. Organizational leaders can not afford to place undue concentration on the machine metaphor in a complex organization.
The Machine Metaphor
The machine metaphor, take an objective view of an organization in which the interactions between the elements of predictable and controllable. Given this premise, organizational leaders, take a mechanisticGiven the organizational management. The mechanistic view sees the organization as a combination of components with relatively simple organizational charts, job descriptions, policies, operational plans, people, etc. The machine metaphor is an organizational management believes that effective management could be realized through the management of all organizational components.
The faulty People Management Mindset
In some cases, this metaphor is wrongly applied to people management.In its opinion column for the twenty-somethings in the 17th July 2005 edition of the Washington Post Career Track Section, Mary Ellen Slayter wrote about it, why resist young professionals moving to the offer to management. "I'm not good at dealing with people" is the reason a 49-year-old lady for her opposition to the offer made available. Pay in the defense of the newly established Department of Homeland Security merit system, said Clay Johnson III, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, "TheFederal Government in general rather badly on the management of people "(Washington Post, National News, July 19, 2005).
This attitude of the people are rooted in our social and organizational systems. It is very important for the organizational leadership to know that to apply the device control techniques, the things, not people. Except for the military, we are managing things. We carry people. The role of a manager is to enable a rich and rewarding environment for employees to do their job. AMan is an agent in an organizational context. This agent's behavior is unpredictable. The agent has to interact with other people in a team, whose behavior is unpredictable. The team needs to interact with other teams in a division. Next, we have interdepartmental interactions, cross-departmental interactions among and so on may cause. The result of the interaction is a complex organization, to adapt to its environment must survive, because the organization is aliving system. As Richard T. Pascale, Mark Mille man, and Linda Gioja articulated in their book, Surfing the Edge of Chaos, (Random House, 2000), as a living system that needs to keep the organization on "the laws of nature and the new laws Development of business ".
Whether managing a corner store or a global conglomerate, the fund management / guide always remember that an organization is a socio-technical system and the machine metaphor should be applied only to the technical or machinistic elements.To ensure the survival of the company's leaders must identify and understand those elements of the organizations that exhibit unpredictable behavior, and the elements whose behavior is predictable. You need to master science and the management of complex adaptive systems for the former and the machine metaphor for the latter. These two approaches form the core of a mixed-initiative perspective.
* (Plsek, PEP & A, Inc; Lindberg, VHA, Inc; Zimmerman, York University;1997-Some new principles for the management of complex adaptive systems).
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