The Hindu Business Line : <I>Connect with management masters </I>

Managers need to be good diagnosticians. "They should be flexible enough to vary their own behaviour in relation to the need to treat in an appropriate way particular subordinates in particular situations."

Thus write Derek S. Pugh and David J. Hickson in `Writers on Organizations,' from Sage (www.sagepublications.com) , while explaining the thoughts of Edgar H. Schein. The book, now in its sixth edition, first appeared in 1964, and has since then `sold more than a third of a million copies and been translated into six languages.' Its popularity is due to the crispness with which the authors have been able to capture the essence of significant contributions from the masters in management.

Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of Max Weber's theories, principal of which was the one on authority structures. "Weber made a distinction between power, the ability to force people to obey regardless of their resistance, and authority, in which orders are voluntarily obeyed by those receiving them."

Markets and hierarchies are alternatives for conducting transactions, one learns from an essay on Oliver E. Williamson. The authors note that a market is the most efficacious mode of conducting transactions when all necessary information is conveyed between parties by a price, and this single item of information is sufficient.

"Transactions are better brought within a hierarchy when much more must be known, much less is certain, and there may be quasi-moral elements, because the hierarchy brings the inadequately informed parties to a transaction together under some degree of control." For example, M&As (mergers and acquisitions) `bring into a single organisation contracting parties whose transactions will then be regulated by the internal rules of a hierarchy and not by the rules of a market'.

Whatever the form of organisation, it will have to work with ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal, and changing information, according to Karl E. Weick. "Despite their façade of numbers and objectivity and accountability, organisations and those who manage them wade among guesswork, subjectivity, and arbitrariness." Make more use of verbs than nouns, he advises; stamp out, therefore, `management' and `organisation', and use `managing' and `organising', instead.

`Be focused, fast, friendly and flexible,' reads the advice of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in the `people' section of the book. The final section, on `organisational change and learning', has six essays, including one that speaks of Peter Senge's view that organisations are afflicted with learning disabilities, which manifest in many a form, including: `the excessive commitment of individuals to their own positions', `the illusion of taking charge', `the delusion that learning comes only from experience', and so on.

A quick way to connect with the leading lights in management.

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D. Murali