Organizational Structure Quotes

Organizational structure and management style are those two factors that we always forget to analyze when the performance of our businesses goes down.

Not just the organizational structure but the management style can also affect your business goals of success and growth.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Leaders can create a high productivity level by providing the appropriate organizational structure and job design, and by acknowledging and appreciating hard work.

By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, nothing is going to be documented until it is completely defensible.

In short, apostolic movement involves a radical community of disciples, centered on the lordship of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, built squarely on a fivefold ministry, organized around mission where everyone (not just professionals) is considered an empowered agent, and tends to be decentralized in organizational structure.

Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next.

The idea of a small circle, of an exalted and loyal sect, except with a traitor infiltrated at its core, an informant who's not foreign to the sect, but constitutes an essential part of its structure---this was the true organizational form of any small society. One must act knowing that there's a traitor infiltrated in the ranks.

If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.

Growth responds to Structure whether organizational or personal. Build a structure for your life if you must grow

maybe life is a cobweb, not an organizational chart.

Structure significantly influences behavior, thereby dramatically impacting results.

The increasing complexity and pace of change demand more agile and collaborative organizational structures.

An organizational structure carries inherent capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame.

A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

A hybrid organizational structure can bring greater awareness of intricacies and systemic value of organizational systems, processes, people dynamics, technology, and resource allocation, etc.

Better understanding the organizational structures that have encouraged problem-solving, risk-taking and horizontal collaborations is thus key to understanding the wave of future radical change.

The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and competition in the marketplace.

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change.

The lower middle class is petty bourgeois. These people seek their security in status; status in an organizational structure. They try to find a place for themselves in an organization which has a hierarchy in which they can count on moving up automatically simply by surviving. Some people still think that most Americans are active, assertive, aggressive, self-reliant people who need no help from anyone, especially the Government, and achieve success as individuals by competing freely with each other. That may have been true 100 years ago. It isn’t true today. Today more and more of us are petty bourgeois who snuggle down in a hierarchical bureaucracy where advancement is assured merely by keeping the body warm and not breaking the rules; it doesn’t matter whether it is education or the Armed Services or a big corporation or the Government. Notice that high school teachers are universally opposed to merit pay. They are paid on the basis of their degrees and years of teaching experience. Or consider the professor. He gets his Ph. D. by writing a large dissertation on a small subject, and he hopes to God he never meets anyone else who knows anything about that subject. If he does, they don’t talk about it; they talk about the weather or baseball. So our society is becoming more and more a society of white-collar clerks on many levels, including full professors. They live for retirement and find their security through status in structures.

A rigid structure does not give room for adaptability and change. A rigid structure turns people into slaves of rules, procedures, policies, and practices.

Ideally, the two structures - hierarchy, and relationship structure wrap around each other to ensure responsibility, to keep information flow and the creation of power.

Each cooperative in Mondragon has its own workplace structure, though there are similarities and tendencies that most of them share. The firm called Irizar, which manufactures products for trans-portation, from luxury coaches to city buses, exemplifies these tendencies. To encourage innovation and the diffusion of knowledge, there are no bosses or departments in Irizar. Rather, it has a flat organizational structure based on work teams with a high degree of autonomy. (One study remarks that they “set their own targets, establish their own work schedules, [and] organize the work process as they see fit.”) The teams also work with each other, so that knowledge is transmitted efficiently. Participation occurs also in the general assembly, which meets three times a year rather than the single annual meeting common in other Mondragon firms. Its subsidiaries in other countries have at least two general assemblies a year, where they approve the company’s strategic plan, investments, etc. These participatory structures have enabled Irizar to surpass its competitors in profitability and market share.69

Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged “structural holes” between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions

A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The "rascal multitude" are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

There is a change underway, however. Our society used to be a ladder on which people generally climbed upward. More and more now we are going to a planetary structure, in which the great dominant lower middle class, the class that determines our prevailing values and organizational structures in education, government, and most of society, are providing recruits for the other groups — sideways, up, and even down, although the movement downward is relatively small. As the workers become increasingly petty bourgeois and as middle-class bureaucratic and organizational structures increasingly govern all aspects of our society, our society is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the lower middle class, although the poverty culture is also growing. The working class is not growing. Increasingly we are doing things with engineers sitting at consoles, rather than with workers screwing nuts on wheels. The workers are a diminishing, segment of society, contrary to Marx’s prediction that the proletariat would grow and grow. I have argued elsewhere that many people today are frustrated because we are surrounded by organizational structures and artifacts. Only the petty bourgeoisie can find security and emotional satisfaction in an organizational structure, and only a middle-class person can find them in artifacts, things that men have made, such as houses, yachts, and swimming pools. But human beings who are growing up crave sensation and experience. They want contact with other people, moment-to-moment, intimate contact. I’ve discovered, however, that the intimacy really isn’t there. Young people touch each other, often in an almost ritual way; they sleep together, eat together, have sex together. But I don’t see the intimacy. There is a lot of action, of course, but not so much more than in the old days, I believe, because now there is a great deal more talk than action. This group, the lower middle class, it seems to me, holds the key to the future. I think probably they will win out. If they do, they will resolutely defend our organizational structures and artifacts. They will cling to the automobile, for instance; they will not permit us to adopt more efficient methods of moving people around. They will defend the system very much as it is and, if necessary, they will use all the force they can command. Eventually they will stop dissent altogether, whether from the intellectuals, the religious, the poor, the people who run the foundations, the Ivy League colleges, all the rest. The colleges are already becoming bureaucratized, anyway. I can’t see the big universities or the foundations as a strong progressive force. The people who run Harvard and the Ford Foundation look more and more like lower-middle-class bureaucrats who pose no threat to the established order because they are prepared to do anything to defend the system.

Jim Crookes, chief architect at BT, has observed, “Companies get the systems they deserve. A company’s systems estate is a result of its culture, organizational history, and its funding structures. Coherent, well-integrated systems will only ever exist in companies that value coherence and integrated service.

However, in part for reasons of organizational convenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period.

we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

The solution for an individual firm must always address three perspectives in any organizational review: structure (how we are formally organized); processes (how different types of decisions are to be made and how conflicts and trade-offs are to be resolved); and people (appointing the right individuals to play the complex roles that will make it all work). No one dimension will solve the problem: all three must be examined. However, the importance of these three elements in the solution is first, people; then processes; then structure.

In any community, there is a tension between a task-oriented culture and a relational (or covenantal) culture. Both are integral to a healthy community. Tasks need the organizational structures of committees, agendas, and regulated, efficient actions. And actions, committees, and structures need to be grounded in, and responsive to, dynamic covenant relationships that are always in process. Most communities, however, have an overwhelming tendency to focus on tasks and structures, and the churches I have served are no exception to this rule. The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, for example, is awash in tasks, such as serving the homeless and the mentally ill, tutoring inner-city teenagers, and tending to our members. We expend an enormous amount of energy engaging these tasks. In fact, tasks consume most of our time and energy. Thus, relationship building is not easy because it is most often done in and around our activities (our tasks). All of this is to say that relation building, if it is to be foundational to communal life, must be intentional and focused, for tasks can be all-consuming.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

Gut Feel Versus Structure Many leaders, especially those who run smaller organizations, believe that they have the natural skills they need to choose good people without any real process. They look back at their careers and remember the good employees they’ve hired and give themselves credit for having recognized those people’s potential. However, they seem to block out the memories of the unsuccessful hires they’ve made, or they justify those mistakes based on the hidden behavioral deficiencies in the people they later had to fire. Whatever the case, they persist in the belief that they know a good person when they see one and that they can go about the hiring process without much structure.

As you try to balance between the socialist and capitalist systems in the world, you will come up against the biggest problem facing humanity today. Jung wrote in 1938 "Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity." Each of these systems promotes itself by pointing out the moral failings of the other, but these moral failings are actually failings brought about by people acting within the context of large organizations. What is truly needed is to learn a structure of organization of human beings that provides for the organized group the same capacity and propensity for moral behavior that is possessed by individuals.

three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternal with each one being more spiritual and subtle the physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neurons it sends and receives by electromagnetic field operations it's got its own nervous system that senses and remembers making decisions and giving directions to other centers emitting enfolded energetic organizational patterns information, that is—communicative interactions detected outside the body by magnetometers and other people for heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel” valid are chakras and acupuncture meridians meditate on the heart chakra to see what this means energy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline water bioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matter information is sent along these lengths of collagen proteins molecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protons crystal water wires inside protein pathways with acupuncture points being junctures in the maze the protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi” a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry

Why hives? Despite unfortunate terms like “queen” and “worker,” hives are actually distributed, nonhierarchical systems. For a swarm of insects, the mission might be “relocate the food source,” which they carry out algorithmically through regurgitated food or pheromone secretions. But there are no managers, no directors, and no assignments from above. Planning, such as there is, is carried out in highly localized fashion by ad hoc teams operating according to their commitment to a mission. When I pressed Green about operating in some sort of organizational anarchy, he replied: “I guess it is anarchy in the sense that there’s no structural chain of command or hierarchy—no ‘government’ of sorts. But it would be a mistake to assume that it’s disordered or without structure. On the contrary, it’s very ordered and there is structure.” The difference in these organizations is how one arrives at order and structure. In traditional firms, it happens by design, that is, through some sort of command-and-control hierarchy. But at firms like Morning Star, groups of individuals create order through social networks built around circumstances and needs. It’s as if the firm had an invisible hand.

Delegation—the assigning of things (work or a task) to individuals. Jethro told Moses to delegate the lesser tasks so he could focus on the major issues of leading the nation of Israel to the promised land. Delegation involves three important elements: Clearly assigning the responsibility the individual is entrusted with. Granting the necessary authority and ability to accomplish the task assigned. Holding the person accountable for the completion of the assigned task. Delegation is not giving an unpleasant task to someone, nor is it getting rid of work to make your workday less than responsible. It is, however: Sharing the work with individuals who have the capability so that you may concentrate on more challenging or more difficult assignments. Providing a format whereby individuals can mature and learn through on-the-job work. Encouraging others to become part of the organization by participative task accomplishment. Allowing individuals to exercise their special gifts and abilities. An important element of the organizational structure of the church is the granting of authority to accomplish the task. Authority is the right to invoke compliance by subordinates on the basis of the formal position in the organizational structure and upon the controls the formal organization has placed on that position. Authority is linked to the position, not the person. Authority is derived in various ways: Position Reputation Experience Expertise Authority and responsibility are directly linked. When you give someone responsibility for a task, then the individual should be given the ability to see to it that the task is accomplished. Responsibility and accountability are also directly linked. If the individual is given the responsibility for a task as well the authority/ability to see to its accomplishment, then it is the manager or administrator’s responsibility to hold the individual accountable to complete the task in the manner assigned and planned. Elements of describing the use of organizational authority include: The use of an organizational chart that establishes the chain of command. The use of functional authority, assigning to individuals in other elements of the organization the authority to administer and control elements of the organization outside their own. Defining span of control, defining within the task assignment specifically what elements of the organization the individual has authority over.

6. Rethink the meeting structure. One typical symptom of a flawed organizational design is too much time spent in meetings. If your employees complain about useless meetings or meetings that last too long, you may want to rethink the contents of the meetings, how often they are being held, and who is being included.

It turns out that an organizational structure that worked well for a Swedish music streaming company may not work for an investment bank. In addition, the original paper showed a snapshot of how Spotify worked in 2012 and things have changed since. It turns out not even Spotify uses the Spotify model.