Simplicity, Trust and Communities of Interest: Can Things Be Done Differently?

The day-to-day life of companies is not just a matter of processes spinning in a void, ineffectual controls or all-devouring intermediate bureaucracies. Different organizations have opted for different choices, without necessarily being able to explain why. A simple deterministic view might lead to the conclusion that they found themselves in different situations in different markets at different points in time. But that is not so, as we shall see in the examples that follow. Similarly, explanations in terms of history are as attractive as they are unsatisfactory. All of the companies visited, with the notable exception of those in the public sector, had experienced a phase of entrepreneurship, during which ‘doing’ took precedence over the question of ‘how’. In most cases, they then ‘rationalized’ how they did things in ways that form the raw material of this book. This vision, based on ‘phases of development’, is attractive because it is Cartesian. In addition, it enables a healthy fatalism in the face of what we know to be pointless (the plethora of processes and controls), without having the means or will to remedy this. This is but a short step from saying one might as well just wait for things to blow over. But, as we have seen, things only blow over (if indeed they ever do) under heavy pressure from the organization’s environment.