Stafford Beer years and years ago pointed out that every company
has a metasystem for handling time:
System 5: |
The stakeholders of the company,
the Past as
identity and ownership.
|
System 4: |
The people charged with the Future of
the company as in competent strategic planning, appropriate
organizational change, training programs, research
and development.
|
System 3: |
The executive directors and
financial officers charged with managing the present, the here and now, the current bottomline,
guarding against waste and inefficiency, while undertaking
crisis management and maintaining discipline.
|
He also pointed out that system Five (5), the stakeholders,
all too often are strategically and developmentally brain-dead,
which leads to a collapse of system Four (4), the future,
into obsession with system Three (3). System
Three (3) then lurches from quarter to quarter mindlessly. Anything
that would improve the company’s strategic position
or its organizational performance is considered by the financial
guardians to be “wasteful expenses”.
In this deplorable and incompetent state of the company, the
constant controls and budget constraints over any and all
intelligent people or elements concerned about the future is tantamount to a self-lobotomy
on the part of the company where brain cells are treated
as if they are fat cells. In this
management atmosphere, no one is allowed to mention the “F-word” (the Future). In addition, observant managers and planners,
aware that this continual stupidity is causing all sorts
of strategic errors and organizational problems, often simply
throw-up their hands and leave the company to try and become
independent consultants or seek employment with more enlightened
and creative companies with a real future (if such exist). The exodus of competence is a company
disaster.
What then is to be done?
| Firstly: |
System Three (3) executive and
financial officers have to realize that they are themselves
presiding over a strategic and organizational failure
that cannot possibly be corrected by repeated crisis
management, further budgetary constraints against the
future (cost-cutting) or silencing all complaint from
within middle management, whether line or staff.
|
| Secondly: |
They must resolve at once to
give greater encouragement, support and financial investment
in the key players and programs that could reconstitute
a viable future of the company. All conservative self-lobotomization of
the company must cease forthwith as a
long overdue system Three (3) repentance.
|
| Thirdly: |
Intransigent people among the
executive and financial officers should be gently but
firmly rooted-out through the force of enlightened
discussions with all relevant parties and representatives
of the stakeholders of system Five (5). |
Without this voluntary self-awakening to the need for investment
in the future of the company, the future of the company will
demonstrate increasingly insoluble problems. Strategic
and organizational incompetence are inevitably punished by
real events in the real world. The
major oil companies, for instance, are showing all the signs
of an entire industry without a future due to (A) ignoring
the obvious problems of Peak
Oil, and (B) under-investing in alternative energy. So, we will see rising oil prices and
profits followed by sudden collapse and bankruptcy of the
oil majors coupled with probable Enron-like scandals as senior managers look increasingly to their
own selfish financial positions. One
does not have to be a strategic genius to see the obvious
trends and dark scenarios emerging at this time.
Things like scenario planning and organizational learning have
never been more urgently necessary yet stubbornly neglected
than in virtually all contemporary multinational or large
companies. Such a state of affairs can only serve
to increase economic downfall and depression, further accelerate
unemployment and foster massive corporate scandals. Without
strategic awakening and innovative learning, strategic chaos
and shock learning must painfully emerge.
