I'm sure I'm dragging the topic (yet) further astray here...
It seems like the underlying pattern is sort of a dynamic balance in an
abstract system space.
Firstly, I appreciate Glen's acute description of corporations... it IS
worth noting that they always exist within the charter of a government,
though it is curious what it means to be an "international"
corporation. It seems that many take advantage of the seams between
different governments, and as we know anecdotally, there are entire
nations which exist somewhat significantly for the purpose of providing
a base for these type of wily? corporations?
I'm curious if there is a "taxonomy of organizations" out there
somewhere... and by "organization" I limit that to organizations of
human beings and their artifacts, not herds of animals, groves of trees,
colonies of symbiotic creatures, or ice floes, etc. Where does a church
fit in? Seems like the Holy Roman Catholic church, while located within
the boundaries of Italy and supported (how?) by the Swiss guard,
represents a fully extra-governmental organization. Multinational
corporations may also fit that model in some sense? Multinational
NGOs? Red Cross, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders? What
about street gangs or motorcycle gangs (are they that different?).
Drug Cartels? Large cooperatives?
In the case of he workplace and the concept of an HR department. The
general principle of adding an extra degree of freedom in a system to
make problems more tractable would seem to show one of it's downsides
here. That extra level of indirection can yield the kinds of problems
we have been citing here... mostly of disconnection between the goals of
the sub-organization (individual, team, project, division, etc.) and the
policies and practices in head hunting, interviewing, hiring.
I do believe that complex human organizations do take on a bit of a
proto-organism status and do begin to do things like grow and organize
themselves entirely around the principle of self-coherence,
perpetuation, growth, even sometimes propagation.
- Steve
On 3/15/17 4:05 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I may have missed the gist of the thread. I thought the observation was that
there were exceptional places to work that were able to maintain and grow a
talented and productive staff. What makes them different? Perhaps it is that
they are ideological and are not just concerned about the number of gold stars
that come with each participant. In contrast, there's the possibility that
this kind of technology grows without that deep motivation, and just for the
sake of growing.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2017 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled
I think you're oversimplifying organizations. First, an organization's "stated mission"
isn't even, itself, a simple thing. If it's a corporation, it has a charter from the state. We
mostly consider that meaningless. But it can be important as we've seen with Trump and New York.
There's even a question about what it means to incorporate. There are different types of
incorporation (C, LLC, etc.). Then there are add-ons like subchapter S or 501c3, etc. And that's
all before we dig into the vagaries of "mission statements" and profits, publicly listed,
private, etc. Then there are even things like the B certification or (as Robert mentioned) ESOPs
and such.
Maybe you see the above as digging my own rhetorical grave ... showing that any
assumption the overhead of an org serves some identifiable purpose is
convoluted, at best. But I think it turns your argument on its head. All
organizations exist to serve their constitutents, even if those constituents
are distal (like passive investors or only impacted by externalities, e.g.
eating oysters after the Deepwater Horizon). So, the direct constituents of an
org _should_ (moral imperative) construct sub-organizations designed to meet
their organizers' objectives.
This should all fit with concepts like group selection or sociological theories of groups
or sub-cultures. The corporation is, just like the cell phone, a technological invention
(techne, technique), part of the human phenotype. The question I'm asking is a specific
sub-focus of "What's the next technological milestone in the exponential leap in
sociological group formation?"
How do/can we customize corporations to better suit our needs and abilities;
even more particularly, how do we move away from buzzword matching and
ham-handed HR departments?
On 03/15/2017 11:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If you accept the assumption that the other stuff (e.g. bureaucracy) mostly serves the
organization's stated mission, then ok. Another hypothesis is that it doesn't,
necessarily, and that these behaviors are a way for sub-organizations to emerge, and this
becomes an end in itself. The sub-organizations are convenient alternative venues for
individuals to become influential or at least protected, i.e. `alternative' relative to
the mission. They'd be the ones saying "Safety is job #1" like your example.
Now this could all lead to a sweet spot environment, or it could be more like a cage
where cross-disciplinary communication is squelched because it tends to undermine the
various local power hierarchies.
--
☣ glen
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