The Hindu Business Line : Can organisations have a better future?

Organisations make things and they sell things ... (They don't) market things, plan things, control things, communicate in retreats or feed masses of data into computers ...

— Henry Mintzberg

The characteristics of the organisation of the future are largely known today. What is missing however is the "social contract of the future."

— Rosabeth Moss Kanter

WHY do we need organisations? Do they really do any good at all? Can they, and should they, be improved? These questions have occupied management thinkers for long. Yet, the first of these, namely the role and purpose of organisations, can only be answered fully by seeking the help of diverse disciplines, not just management writers. Occupational psychology, economics, sociology and anthropology are some of the fields with their own perspectives on why we need organisations and what role they have in this complicated and increasingly conflict-ridden world. One thing is certain. We seem to be unable to take a step anywhere, or undertake any sort of activity involving more than a handful of people without committees, associations or task forces, and very few of them work satisfactorily.

It is commonplace that organisations, though intended to make our tasks easier, seem to have a mind of their own. They assume a life of their own too and need feeding and caring for like some capricious and demanding pet that takes over the routine of the household. They get in the way of our getting on with what we wanted to do in the first place. A few exceptions such as Ricardo Semler have taken organisational living to an altogether different plane, and yet the reaction of any typical audience is that it must be a rare and singular exception. No one wants to challenge received wisdom.

Nothing brings out the contrariness of people acting in relationships as sharply as does the task of organising. The Western concept of an organisation in the writings of the leading thinkers from Weber to Drucker traditionally concentrated on tasks, roles, responsibilities, as well as functional goals and processes, for example, planning, reporting and monitoring. Yet organisations come unstuck because it is the people aspect that proves to be their undoing. Neither the quantity of knowledge and expertise nor the more rational and logical aspect is as much of a problem. Anyone who has tried to organise and run a neighbourhood Deepavali get-together or a committee of fellow residents in an apartment block would need no further evidence of this point. For every proposal there are three different objections and one cannot accommodate any one, it seems, without giving offence to another. Agreeing to some via media is fraught with all sorts of implications, such as loss of one's amour propre.

Contrast this with what a Ladakhi villager said to a European researcher who spent decades studying the language and culture. "I may disagree with my neighbour, but what is the point? I have to live in the same village." It was more important to keep harmony than see who won by how many points. It was a culture in which one who flew into a rage was considered immature and publicly made to feel sorry. Although land belonged to families it was never partitioned, and during harvests if anyone was free, she just chipped in and helped — because by definition, land and water belonged to Nature and human beings only held them in sacred trust.

In the modern Indian urban context, however, a community of equals or a leaderless group is an alien concept to us — or so it seems after considerable observation and reflection. In any social or cultural cause everyone automatically assumes that he is a superior and others therefore his subordinates. Nature abhors a vacuum which apparently is the reason why the first thing that any group of three people seems to need before doing anything of value, is to elect one person each as President, Secretary and Treasurer! In a sense, a block of flats is, after all, a vertical village. One gets shared benefits along with responsibilities that require as much of a sense of community but the notion has not seeped into us `superior' city-dwellers yet.

Perhaps it takes a whole generation for the mind to adjust to certain realities, even if economic and social compulsions have made such high-density urban living a fact of life for the past three decades. Our instinct seems to be to externalise the duties onto some other institution (say, an administrator or a janitor) to whom we can then complain and about whom we can moan and gripe over the coffee break. You see this in offices also, where "the head office" or "the rigid procedures" is a favourite target of all critique sessions. What is more disturbing is that the higher the academic qualifications and distinctions of the group of people, the greater the difficulty in avoiding dysfunctional and disruptive behaviour in a team of equals. Consider the interminable faculty meetings that every academic institution is familiar with. They are usually over trivia — and (this is not entirely a fanciful example) a question such as `to have self-service coffee or not' can give rise to impassioned theories on both sides, deserving a thesis.

The unfortunate inheritance of a colonial administration, rooted in procedure and precedent, is an unhelpful template when it comes to very different tasks. And the middle class that predominates in the managerial and administrative cadres has this template engraved on its mind. This one fact alone is a major culprit: we are unable to distinguish between the unique demands of revenue administration and law-giving on the one hand — and getting things done, in time and within costs, which is the managerial challenge, on the other. Everyone has hierarchies, rules and disciplines, of course, and politics and problems with relationships are never far away even if it is only an amateur cricket team from friends and neighbours, and yet, Indians can complicate life in a peculiar way. And so it takes an inordinate amount of time and frayed nerves before a group of people, who in other spheres hold positions of high responsibility, can agree on common norms on how cars may be parked, rubbish may be disposed of and how the commonly owned areas could be best maintained and not encroached upon.

Having seen work in at least four different national cultures at close quarters, I am of the view that while some things are universal, Indians contribute their own uniqueness to organisational issues. Indian organisations sometimes are caught in a three-layer bind comprising our own traditional feudalistic ways, the bureaucratic ways of administration and the modern American-inspired beliefs and expectations. This leads to hilarious and sometime painful situations. This is also the reason why the same person who behaves in a co-operative way in one circumstance, say, a temple festival, becomes a curmudgeon in another, for example, about agreeing on ways to conserve the usage of water. It also must have a role in explaining the inability to deal with leaderless situations. Affluent young executives used to the perquisites of their office suffer the worst. They expect that anyone in the apartment block who volunteers, say, to look after the garden can then be treated in the same disdainful way that is reserved for the socially inferior — little realising that it a voluntary, unpaid responsibility for a thankless task, which might one day befall them too! In other words, they simply cannot accommodate behaviour that does not in some way acknowledge their status, level and importance. This leads to petulance and anger and avoidable displays of a general lack of breeding and good manners.

Negativity and obstructionism, on the other hand, are far more prominent in a work culture where one's place in the hierarchy determines power and designation is everything. The typical experience that the ordinary citizen has of officialdom may flow from this, where nearly all the self-esteem and pride is derived from "the office" often simply because there is so little job satisfaction at making a contribution. The larger the organisation, the smaller one's relative size, and hence the greater the insensitivity to the citizen or customer as the case may be. If such mammoth enterprises, as in the public sector, also enjoy near monopoly, is it any wonder that the people in them are almost exclusively focussed internally, on who is due for the next transfer or promotion?

Is there a way out of this state of affairs or must we put it down to the inevitable costs of growth in size and number of institutions in a modern society? I hope to ponder over this in future pieces in this column too, so do please write and let me know what you think.

(The author is Director, Institute for Financial Management and Research, Chennai.)

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