When we look at organization in its most simple form, when we seek certain key actions or circumstances that make organization work, when we need a very simple, very vital rundown to teach people that will produce results, we find only a few points we need to stress.
The purpose of organization is TO MAKE PLANNING BECOME ACTUALITY.
Organization is not just a fancy, complex system, done for its own sake. That is bureaucracy at its worst. Org boards for the sake of org boards, graphs for the sake of graphs, rules for the sake of rules only add up to failures.
The only virtue (not always a bad one) of a complex, unwieldy, meaningless bureaucratic structure is that it provides jobs for the friends of those in control. If it does not also bring about burdensome taxation and threatened bankruptcy by reason of the expense of maintaining it, and if it does not saddle a people or production employees with militant inspections and needless control, organization for the sake of providing employment is not evil but beyond providing employment is useless, and only when given too much authority is it destructive.
The kings of France and other lands used to invent titles and duties to give activity to the hordes of noble hangers-on to keep them at court, under surveillance, and out of mischief out in the provinces where they might stir up their own people. “Keeper of the Footstools,” “Holder of the Royal Nightgown” and other such titles were fought for, bought, sold and held with ferocity.
Status-seeking, the effort to become more important and have a personal reason for being and for being respected, gets in the road of honest efforts to effectively organize in order to get something done, in order to make something economically sound.
Organization for its own sake, in actual practice, usually erects a monster that becomes so hard to live with that it becomes overthrown. Production losses, high taxes, irritating or fearsome interference with the people or actual producers invites and accomplishes bankruptcy or revolt, usually both even in commercial companies.
Therefore to be meaningful, useful and lasting, an organization has to fit into the definition above:
TO MAKE PLANNING BECOME ACTUALITY.
In companies and countries there is no real lack of dreaming. All but the most depraved heads of companies or states wish to see specific or general improvement. This is also true of their executives and, as it forms the basis of nearly all revolts, it is certainly true of workers. From top to bottom, then, there is, in the large majority, a desire for improvement.
More food, more profit, more pay, more facilities, and, in general, more and better of whatever they believe is good or beneficial. This also includes less of what they generally consider to be bad.
Programs which obtain general support consist of more of what is beneficial and less of what is detrimental. “More food, less disease,” “more beautiful buildings, less hovels,” “more leisure, less work,” “more activity, less unemployment,” are typical of valuable and acceptable programs.
But only to have a program is to have only a dream. In companies, in political parties, useful programs are very numerous. They suffer only from a lack of execution.
All sorts of variations of program failure occur. The program is too big. It is not generally considered desirable. It is not needed at all. It would benefit only a few. Such are surface reasons. The basic reason is lack of organization know-how.
Any program, too ambitious, partially acceptable, needed or not needed, could be put into effect if properly organized.
The five-year plans of some nations which are currently in vogue are almost all very valuable and almost all fall short of their objectives. The reason is not that they are unreal, too ambitious or generally unacceptable. The reason for any such failure is lack of organization.
It is not Man’s dreams that fail him. It is the lack of know-how required to bring those dreams into actuality.
Good administration has two distinct targets:
1. To perpetuate an existing company, culture, or society
2. To make planning become actuality.
Given a base on which to operate — which is to say land, people, equipment and a culture — one needs a good administrative pattern of some sort just to maintain it.
Thus 1 and 2 above become 2 only. The plan is “to continue the existing entity.” No company or country continues unless one continues to put it there. Thus an administrative system of some sort, no matter how crude, is necessary to perpetuate any group or any subdivision of a group. Even a king or headman or manager who has no other supporting system to whom one can bring disputes about land or water or pay is an administrative system. The foreman of a labor gang that only loads trucks has an astonishingly complex administrative system at work.
Companies and countries do not work just because they are there or because they are traditional. They are continuously put there by one or another form of administration.
When a whole system of admin moves out or gets lost or forgotten, collapse occurs unless a new or substitute system is at once moved into place.
Changing the head of a department, much less a general manager and much, much less a ruler, can destroy a portion or the whole since the old system, unknown, disregarded or forgotten, may cease and no new system which is understood is put in its place. Frequent transfers within a company or country can keep the entire group small, disordered and confused, since such transfers destroy what little administration there might have been.
Thus, if administrative shifts or errors or lack can collapse any type of group, it is vital to know the basic subject of organization.
Even if the group is at effect — which is to say originates nothing but only defends in the face of threatened disaster, it still must plan. And if it plans, somehow it must get the plan executed or done. Even a simple situation of an attacked fortress has to be defended by planning and doing the plan, no matter how crude. The order, “Repel the invader who is storming the south wall,” is the result of observation and planning no matter how brief or unthorough. Getting the south wall defended occurs by some system of administration even if it only consists of sergeants hearing the order and pushing their men to the south wall.
A company with heavy debts has to plan even if it is just to stall off creditors. And some administrative system has to exist even to do only that.
The terrible dismay of a young leader who plans a great and powerful new era only to find himself dealing with old and weak faults, is attributable not to his “foolish ambition” or “lack of reality” but to his lack of organizational know-how.
Even elected presidents or prime ministers of democracies are victims of such terrible dismay. They do not, as is routinely asserted, “go back on their campaign promises” or “betray the people.” They, as well as their members of parliament, simply lack the rudiments of organizational know-how. They cannot put their campaign promises into effect not because they are too high-flown but because they are politicians not administrators.
To some men it seems enough to dream a wonderful dream. Just because they dreamed it they feel it should now take place. They become very provoked when it does not occur.
Whole nations, to say nothing of commercial firms or societies or groups, have spent decades in floundering turmoil because the basic dreams and plans were never brought to fruition.
Whether one is planning for the affluence of the Appalachian Mountains or a new loading shed closer to the highway, the gap between the plan and the actuality will be found to be lack of administrative know-how.
Technical ignorance, finance, even lack of authority and unreal planning itself are none of them true barriers between planning and actuality.Thus, we come to the exact most basic steps that comprise administration.
First is OBSERVATION. From beginning to end, observation must serve both those in charge and any others who plan. When observation is lacking, then planning itself as well as any and all progress can become unreal and orders faulty and destructive. Observation, in essence, must be TRUE. Nothing must muddy it or color it as this can lead to gross errors in action and training.
Next is PLANNING itself. Planning is based on dreams but it must be fitted to what is needed and wanted and what men can do, even with stretched imaginations or misgivings. Planning has to be targeted and scheduled and laid out in steps and gradients or one will be laying railroad tracks that pass through oceans or boring tunnels in mountains that do not exist or building penthouses without putting any building under them to hold them up.
The essence of planning is COMMUNICATION and the communication must be such that it can be understood and will not be misunderstood. For unless those who oversee and those who do, know what their part of the plan is, they cannot execute their share and very well may oversee and do quite some other action, leaving a monstrous gap and even a structure that ate up their time and funds but now has to be torn down.
The next is SUPERVISION and supervision is dually needful. It serves as a relay point to which plans can be communicated and from which observations as reports can be received; and it serves as the terminal which communicates the plans as orders and sees that they are actually done. This gives one the genus of the org board as a central ordering point which has other relay ordering points taking care of their part of the whole plan or program. These points are often also the points which care for local occurrences which must be handled, and their frailty is that they become so involved with local occurrences, oddities and purely local concerns that they do not or can not give any attention to receiving, relaying and overseeing their part of the main plan.
Then there are the PRODUCERS who produce the service or the structure or the product required by the plan. Many plans are marvelous in all respects but putting somebody there to actually DO the required actions that make the plan real. The primary fault is to use persons who already have projects and duties to which they are committed and, with their local knowledge, see must be continued at any cost but who are forced to abandon existing programs or duties to start on this new activity, solely because the new activity has the stress given it in orders and the old activities are seemingly ordered left alone. Old companies and old countries could be said to be “that collection of incomplete and abandoned projects which is confused and failing.”
Finally there is the USER, those who will use or benefit from the program when it is realized and completed. When planning fails to take this element into account, only then can the whole program fail utterly, for it, regardless of dreams, labor and expense, is finally seen to be of no value anyway. Thus all great programs begin with an understanding or a survey of what is needed and wanted; and a nose and value count of those who will use it; and a costing action in time, labor, materials and finance, compared to the value of it, even if only aesthetic, of those who will use it in any way if only to know they have it or to be proud of it or to feel better or stronger because they have done it.Thus one gets the points which are the true administrative points:
1. OBSERVATION even down to discovering the users and what is needed and wanted.
2. PLANNING which includes imaginative conception and intelligent timing, targeting and drafting of the plans so they can be communicated and assigned.
3. COMMUNICATING which includes receiving and understanding plans and their portion and relaying them to others so that they can be understood.
4. SUPERVISION which sees that that which is communicated is done in actuality.
5. PRODUCTION which does the actions or services which are planned, communicated and supervised.
6. USERS by which the product or service or completed plan is used.
Administrative systems or organizations which lack at least the rudiments of the above system will not bring off the dream and will accumulate an enormous lot of uncompleted actions. Not a few failures, bankruptcies, overthrows and revolutions have occurred because one or all of the above points were awry in an existing organization.
The amount of heroic executive overwork which comes from the omission of one or more of these vital essential points accounts for the ulcers which are the occupational disease of those in charge.
When some or all these points are awry or gone, an executive or ruler or his minister is reduced to an anxiety which can only watch for the symptoms of bankruptcy or attack or revolt.
Even if so reduced, an executive who fends off disaster while getting in a system which satisfies the above points has an enormously bettered chance of winning at long last.
The dual nature of an administrative system or an organization now becomes plain.
Let us pry apart 1 and 2 above. The effort to hold an existing organization together is really different than trying to get a plan into actuality. In practice, one has an organization of some sort. It has functions and it has local concerns and problems. And it has programs and actions from past control centrals or which were locally generated.
To push in upon this plans which, no matter how well conceived or intentioned, are additional to its load will cause a great deal of confusion, incomplete projects left dangling and general upset.
To place new programs into action, two prior actions are necessary:
A. Put in a whole new system paralleling the old existing system.
B. Survey the old system and its existing programs to preserve them, eradicate them or combine them with the new plans.
To leave A and B undone is to court disaster. Whether one is aware of the old programs or the old organization or not, THEY REMAIN AND WILL CONTINUE — even if only as a pile of undone, unsorted papers nobody knows where to file or as a pile of odd unfinished masonry some future generation can’t identify or will identify with scorn of administrations in general.
New leaders are sometimes looked upon as a worse scourge than a foreign enemy and new patterns of rule are often subjected to overthrow simply because they did not, out of ignorance or laziness, do A and B above.
One sometimes finds a company unit or a military officer left in some unheard of place for years, at continuing expense, guarding or nibbling at some project in a bewildered or philosophic fashion.
The activity remained unremembered, unhandled when a new broom and new planners entered the scene.
This can get so bad that a company or a nation’s resources can be broken to bits. The old plans, disorganized, not known, discredited, are superseded by new plans and new ambitions. The old plans are in the road of the new plans and the new plans prevent old plans from completing. The result is an impasse. And the men in charge, even at the level of junior executives, become even more puzzled and bewildered than the workers and begin to believe no new plans can ever be done, blame the ignorance of the populace and the cruelty of fate and give up.
All they had to do was put in a complete new parallel system as in the 1 to 6 outline above for their new plans and to meanwhile preserve and continue the old system while they surveyed for preservation, eradication or combination of it. It is sometimes even good sense to continue old projects to completion currently with new projects just to maintain stability in the company or country and somehow find new finance and new people for the new plans. It is often far less costly than to simply confuse everything.
Furthermore, all NEW and untried plans should have PILOT PROJECTS which by test and use must be successful before one incorporates them and their new workers into the old system as a parallel dependable activity.
A “chicken in every pot” as a campaign promise could easily succeed if organized as in 1 to 6 above.
There is a lot to organization. It requires trained administrators who can forward the programs. But a “trained” administrator who does not grasp the principles of organization itself is only a clerk.
At this current writing Man has not had administrative training centers where actual organization was taught. It was learned by “experience” or by working in an organization that was already functioning. But as the principles were not the same company to company and nation to nation, the differences of background experiences of any set of administrators differed to such a degree that no new corps could be assembled as a team.
Thus it was said to require a quarter to a half a century to make a company. But the number of ineffective bureaucracies and national failures which existed stated clearly that there were too few skilled administrators and too few training activities.
Man’s happiness and the longevity of companies and states apparently depend upon organizational know-how. Hiring specialized experts to get one out of trouble is a poor substitute for knowing what it is all about in the first place.
Organization is actually a simple subject, based on a few basic patterns which, if applied, produce success.
If one would dream and see his dreams an actuality, one must also be able to organize and to train organizational men who will make those dreams come true.