Approaches and strategies of comprehensive models applied to business administration.
Efficient managers and professionals from all walks of life, whether they are business executives, management, consultants, politicians, or union members, have become skilled in the art of understanding the situations they are trying to organize or manage.
This skill is generally developed as an intuitive process, learned through experience and natural ability.
Although someone may sometimes declare that they need to "understand what's going on in X," the understanding process happens on a subconscious level. For this reason it is often believed that managers and problem solvers have been born more than they have been made and that they have a kind of magical power to understand and master the situations they find themselves in.
Taken from:
MORGAN, Gareth.
Images of the organization
Chapter 1. Introduction
Alfaomega. Mexico 1998
It is a style of management proper to each administrator, which is observed in organizations; since the way in which the administrative principles and the basic strategy of guiding the companies towards the fulfillment of the objectives that it outlines are adapted, are the basic qualities that create difference. Without ruling out the birth of the administrator itself, the school or training on which many professionals or people who lead and exercise administrative activity in the different organizations is the cradle and the fundamental axis to determine the future of them, because depending on the how it is administered, this will be the results that will be obtained.
It is a kind of cause and effect relationship; where the members of a team that is called a company, must implement their own and adaptable strategies to each entity so that the people and processes that make it up can be combined in relation to a common ideal that is aimed at achieving benefits that persecutes both the organization and its members. This is the ideal state, but achieving it consists of the effort, work and dedication that its representatives must ensure. To achieve it does not mean the guarantee of success but it does provide the means to achieve it.
From there comes the argument about how two or more companies formed in the same environment under the same conditions, one progresses and the other or the others do not; Or better yet, why what works for one company does not work for the other?
Could it be that it is conditioned to the ease of adaptation to changes, or why not say it to the way in which these are introduced into the administrative scheme of organizations? The truth is that there are plenty of reasons to find answers to this question, since the universality of the causes that generate administrative, financial, commercial, etc. inconveniences in organizations to gain competitiveness in the environment in which they work are specific to each organization; But what we cannot rule out is that much has to do with the way they are addressed and implemented by their managers.
The effect it generates in people, development on new administrative trends is a risk factor that implies knowing how to guide organizational development mechanisms or strategies in the most intelligent and appropriate way, since they are the people who are part of the entity as such that to a certain extent they can regulate the level of fulfillment and satisfaction in achieving these purposes.
We cannot rule out that the appropriate position on which the application of organizational strategies rests is on the thesis that they are processes that people use to achieve goals and not goals that must be achieved in organizations by running over and sacrificing people. Here is the action point to achieve the expected results.
Under these premises, it is important to do a bit of history and remember that the wave of changes at the organizational level began to take shape in the mid-20th century when it was observed that the discourse that had been given until then had not been effective for organizations. due to the changes demanded by the same medium in which they take place. The strategy is fundamentally to integrate the material body with the social body and in this way achieve the organizational objectives set.
We are going to make a presentation that will allow us to analyze the different ways in which we can observe the organization; Well, what better way than the metaphor to interpret the similes that can be created in the different business entities that develop in our environment.
Machine, organism, brain and culture; What to take from each one? and what to reject ?; That is the task and from there a series of analyzes is segregated that serve as a basis for the administrator or those in charge of implementing the different organizational plans to achieve their projected goals and purposes. The metaphor of the organization as a machine has its antecedents in the industrial revolution, because when comparing the organization as a machine what better scenario than the industry.
Many times we have heard people who work in different companies or organizations express terms such as: I am worn out, I need a replacement, it no longer works like before, etc.
Although we can analyze the background of these expressions, we can associate them with the same expressions that a mechanic can use when exposing the situation about the parts of a car to its owner. This is precisely the most important aspect of everything; its beginnings, because it is people who begin to generate this qualification in themselves.
The simple fact of being considered as an element is already categorizing the official as material; one more resource that is necessary to be able to fulfill organizational purposes and forgetting how transcendental the difference between people and machines turns out to be.
Very paradoxical are these arguments when, for example, an official who has given fifteen years of service to a technology organization, initially told him: "his work is as perfect as if it were done by a machine" and they praised him and merits.
The discourse today is different, since the value that managers give to that same worker is similar to that of a worn-out machine, due to the fact that currently this organization, in a continuous improvement plan, is carrying out process systematization programs, and in this way the official finds himself with the unpleasant news that until today he provides his services to this company; However, they thank him very much for his work and all his dedication to the organization, which for reasons of restructuring makes it necessary to do without its valuable work.
Could it be that the reasons that motivated the directors of this company were really that the employee is already over 50 years old ?, that he does not know how to use a computer and also why wear himself out as a company in training a person who may not be useful for for a long time ?, and what better opportunity than to hire a young person who is not more than 30 years old and who has more agile movements and much more effective and efficient response activities? All this thinking about the benefit for the company.
The human is relegated, it is a reality from which we cannot hide. Technological advances, so many calls, so many e-mails, so many letters, so many responses, so many visits, so many meetings, so many committees, when do you think? When do we feed back? These are some of the aspects that today make administrators people who do not manage to analyze day to day and how to plan. Well, when we have finished a task there are three or more in turn and other activities that are being generated for future fulfillment.
Resilience is perhaps an issue that influences a lot when it comes to adapting in organizations, the trades that accompany each of the positions, the great operational work that this implies and the results that should not be expected make the People act more as necessary elements to organizations than as thinking beings of organizations. Messages like: there is no waiting, it has to be already, it was yesterday, you are late; are some of the arguments that limit the power to develop the intangible potential in people.
Adaptation, key to achieve fit in companies and achieve the purposes that are needed from it.
Mechanism and Adaptation 1
Adaptation is essentially the basic mechanism that explains evolution from a mechanistic perspective. However, although adaptation undoubtedly exists, it is questionable whether it is capable of clarifying everything that needs to be addressed. Chance, another mechanistic bulwark, does not explain, but rather collects unsolvable problems in a dark room, it is not known whether provisionally or definitely. But explaining does not, I have already written that in my opinion from different ideological bases, it is equivalent to say because God wants it by chance. God and chance are two allegations of rational inexplicability, but I cannot admit that rationally neither of them explains, although there are inexplicable phenomena.
The precise work on the guidelines of responsibility and authority, in compliance with the norms and policies that govern the organization, the rigid outline of lines of command where some are those who order and others are those who comply; and the tendency that the own style of incentive towards the worker is oriented towards recognizing money for his work and at the same time giving him a trade or job to fulfill, are the qualifiers of the mechanistic metaphor where its operation is basically bureaucratic.
Bureaucracy: It is a form of organization that enhances the precision, speed, clarity, regularity, precision and efficiency achieved through the creation of the predetermined division of tasks of hierarchical supervision and detailed rules and regulations. (Weber).
Another analysis is to see the organization as a living organism, where the metaphor is oriented to compare it with its own style of communication and participation, in which it is intended to guarantee the durability and permanence of administrative ideas and trends over time. The motivational orientation and personal satisfaction is directed towards the development of the officials, thinking about the basic needs of the worker and the way to be able to satisfy them, but is it really what the organization proposes?
Complete satisfaction is difficult to achieve and when it comes to business management the task is even more interesting. The theme is to know how to interpret the current behavior of the market, and in this way to have a complete preparation that allows the following paragraph to be interpreted: “because it is not the big fish that eats the boy, but it is the fastest fish that absorbs the slow."
This type of interpretation is based on the theory of evolution, and as such it tends to renew itself as changes and development processes occur. Just as it has happened with living beings that have reached stages of constant variations, product of evolution, this same trend is transferred to organizations.
As a brain, the holography-oriented metaphor aims to make organizations flexible, resilient, and with initiative, anti-machine theories. A fundamental support lies in cybernetics, where put at the service of the organization, it is intended to have more daring companies than by mechanism and organicism.
Organizational capacity here translates into learning to learn, organizations are designed as a learning system. There is a less limited rationality, but one cannot enter into excesses, since excess autonomy generates atomization of power.
Under this purpose, the human being is studied from his personality traits or psychological infrastructure. Taking into account that in these scenarios autonomous work teams and officials are created capable of carrying out tasks without the need to think about mechanistic activities but always guided by compliance lines.
Organizational culture is created under elements of this purpose; they are the values, the norms and the beliefs, among others, and their fundamental role is developed around allowing to externalize this type of aspects in the people who are part of the organization. We cannot confuse strategy with culture; because the first one can affect the second so much that it could affect the freedom and normal and natural development of people.
In the film called "Office entanglements" the way in which organizations' management styles are lived and developed is humorously evident. Its development shows how some office managers, despite having valuable people who can contribute much more than they represent for the organization, do not benefit from it; because the global or organizational interest is thought more than the same entrepreneurial dynamics of people.
Hence, many times the attitudes and reactions of employees are against management and why not say it against the company; So much so that at the end of their entire career the opportunity of a repressed, isolated and stigmatized official ends up taking the best of opportunities by benefiting from an economic resource of the organization and what better opportunity to disappear any evidence than incinerating the company. Cases like these are seen daily in organizations; but not destroying them as it happened in said film but misusing their resources.
The resentment on the part of the people is such that the paper that can be reused is destroyed, the photocopies that are used are not only of the company, the calls exceed the necessary ones, the time is used in things different from those of the qualified within the labor activity, the stationery supplies are never sufficient and the image of the company in the opportunity that can be trampled.
These are samples of people or better employees who are not satisfied in their jobs, officials who, unlike feeling like owners of the company, are the company that denotes themselves as their owners.
The logical reason lies in an appropriate and adequate administration strategy. These metaphors are enriching to take the best of each one and use ourselves as such to achieve the purposes that the company draws up.
As administrators, we will always have under our responsibility the management of an economic or material resource and the management of people. Let us know how to use the best contribution of these principles and thus give way to a balanced, fair and productive administration. Remember that this is an important factor to consider when measuring the results of any organization. Let us not forget that companies are combinations of material elements and human talents, and the management capacity lies in knowing how to combine these variables around the satisfaction of people and the achievement of the objectives of the organization.
Taken from the book The Pregnant Life of the author Miguel García Casas, Chapter 7 called Theory of Pregnant Life. Miguel García Casas was born in 1955 in the city of Valencia (Spain). He has a PhD in Biological Sciences and is a Professor of Biology and Geology at the La Morería Secondary School in the town of Mislata, bordering Valencia.
