Designing a Dis-Entropic Organization

Abstract

Many of us would be surprised to learn that the very logic of size, power and control which brought success and stability in the past have also been the source of disorder, chaos and attrition of energy and enthusiasm in organizations. In the past, organizations were desired for their size, abundance, financial strength, and managers were celebrated for their political prowess, tactical creativity, predictable and customary style of leadership, and employees believed that people at the top are omnipotent and have all the wisdom to secure everybody's interest. Such factors, no doubt, had played significant role in ensuring profitability, efficiency, and scale-based economic advantages. In the recent times, however, as organizations are facing accelerated change and unsurmountable complexity, managers and employees find themselves helpless; feel that they have no locus of control on their actions, often could not trust their fellow employees and easily get offended by sermons from corporate leaders. And whenever they experience uncertainty and instability due to accelerated change, organizational decisions are deployed with the routine logic and thumb-rule that worked well in the past, be it change management, leadership selection, corporate strategy, and choice of financial instrument. Pursuing a trodden path to think and decide a course of action to resolve modern organizational challenges can be an invitation for disaster. Complexity and pace of change in environments create paradoxical management tensions both from within and without. While organizations have to keep moving to stay current and cope with the dynamic changes in consumer segments, regulations, global trends and technology, they also have to deal the paradoxical tensions with regard to organization design choices, resource allocation, business strategies, stakeholder expectations, time-horizon of investments and returns, choice of technology formats, cooperative vs competitive strategies, or whether to externalize the transactions or internalize them with ownership and bureaucratic controls.