Organizations are a set of people and resources related to each other and to their attributes to achieve a common goal, which interacts with the context and constitutes a totality. They can be classified as follows…
- Formal: structured with positions and hierarchies Informal: freely organized Primary: with full and emotional dedication Secondary: with contractual relationships
Organizations, as social systems, are responsible for the consequences of their decisions and actions, for which they must balance the influence of the environment with their responsibilities, satisfying social needs when manufacturing a product or providing a service.
organizations-as-social-systems-1Operational Wheel
The operational wheel simplifies the vision of the company since it graphs all the existing functions in it. This graph does not depend on the size of the company since, according to this, the only variations will be the people who perform each function and their way of development.
The employer, located in the center of it, will have the main objective of achieving efficiency, which will only be possible if he makes all the necessary operational decisions so that the operational wheel does not stop and turn as quickly as possible.
This way of mechanically organizing the company remains in the way of thinking of the people who make it up. When companies organize themselves aiming only at the objective of making the operational wheel work, kingdom structures are generated where each area is limited to fulfilling the specific objective for which it was created. That is why the operational wheel does not ensure efficiency without the establishment of a network structure that allows interrelationships to deepen and develop so that the organization works better and better under the criterion that all areas must meet all objectives. Network structures must be prepared to adapt to permanent changes, ensuring that good global results are obtained and not just specific ones.
Companies as dynamic systems
- Inputs: system income that constitutes the starting force that supplies the system with its operational needs Process: transforms an input into an output. This process can receive two categories, a white box when it is designed by the administrator and how it is integrated is known, or a black box when the process is not known or is not of interest in detail. Outputs: results that are obtained when processing the inputs, they are the result of the operation of the system or the purpose for which the system has been created. Feedback: it occurs when the exits or the influences of the context, re-enter as resources or information. Limit: separates the system from its environment and functions as a filter, maintaining a degree of autonomy and interdependence.
Each system and subsystem contains an internal process that develops on the basis of the action, interaction and reaction of different elements that must be known. This process is dynamic and each element that exists within systems and subsystems is usually called a variable. Variables can be parameters when there are no changes under any specific circumstance, or operators when the variables activate the others and are able to include decisively in the process so that it can start.
The company system can, in a broad sense, be analyzed as the integration of two subsystems…
- Reality: represents the real part of the organization, the people, its facilities, etc. Model: integrated by all the tools or methods that the administration creates to handle reality as control.
If the company remains with the same reality, it will not be able to survive since the environment forces this change and the modifications in the reality subsystem will motivate the change of the model system.
In more detail, we could divide the organization into four subsystems…
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- Administrative System: this system is an abstract system where decisions are not made but has as input the decisions of the political system and as output the decision-making system. In turn, this system will be made up of four subsystems… Communication system: made up of all the communication channels between the different people who make up the organization, both in formal and informal communication, in ascending, descending or horizontal communication. Influence system: refers to the degree of influence that one person can have over another and if this system is not well established, the efficiency in the operation of the previous system will not matter. Information system: this system depends on the previous ones since its operation will be determined by communication and influence. Control system: this subsystem is at the base of the administrative system since its objective is to verify that what is planned coincides with reality. Its periodicity avoids problems.
Companies are immersed in an environment from which they receive influences of all kinds and with which they interact permanently. When coming into contact with the environment, the company must be prepared to absorb and process the variables that it imposes in such a way that the structure and context are permanently fed back.
If the entrepreneur of the operational wheel stays within it, he will lose sight of all the changes in context and their effects within the organization. The entrepreneur must constantly update his strategy to face the changes imposed by his environment.
Around the companies there are other companies, some of which are dedicated to manufacturing or marketing similar products or services and try to reach the consumer by competing with each other.
Competitors play a fundamental role in the context since they can determine the success or failure of our company. Competition will not be determined only by direct competition but also by what Serra and Kastica call competitive forces…
- Direct competition: they work in the same market producing the same products. Substitute competition: they offer different products in the same market but that fulfill the same function. Potential competition: those who in the future may enter the market with the same or very similar product. Buyers: They can affect the profitability of the organization depending on the conditions you impose. Suppliers: according to their conditions, the existence of others that offer the same products, etc.
Faced with these forces, organizations can establish entry barriers…
- Hard: infrastructure, machinery, capital, technology, etc. Soft: training, training, customer service, investment in human resources, etc.
It is advisable to maintain a minimum level of hard barriers and the maximum possible of soft, since, as these barriers can become exit barriers, soft barriers allow a faster adaptation to another activity.
Beyond the ways that the organization implements to deal with the variables of the context, it is necessary to work on the three fundamental pillars of any company, strategy - structure - culture, in order to create flexible companies with high possibilities of success.
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- Structure: is the sum total of the ways in which the work is divided into the different coordinated tasks. Its elements must be selected in order to achieve internal harmony and basic consistency with the organization's situation, that is, with its environment.
The formation of the strategy is a permanent and dynamic process in which the entire organization intervenes, which is why the structures must be prepared to be part of this process. Over the years, the strategy has been seen to fail due to the differences that existed between its formulation and its implementation. The analysis of this gap made it possible to determine that the key to implementation lay in the culture of the company, the correct communication of the strategy will allow a gradual change of behavior and the re-elaboration of the structures by virtue of the changes that the context imposes on it. the organization.
THE THIRD WAVE
| First Wave - Agricultural Era
8000 BC to 1650/1750 (appearance of the steam engine) |
Second Wave - Industrial Age
1650/1750 to 1955 (computer, penicillin, and airplanes) |
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| - Family | Great (father, children and many relatives) due to the need imposed by work in the fields. | Nuclear family (parents and two children) where the father worked, the wife at home and the children went to school. |
| - Society | Decentralized and made up of social castes determined by birth. Parental ties and feudal loyalty. | Centralized, the social position was determined by the individual based on their development, care institutions such as hospitals, schools, nursing homes, etc. arise. Contractual society. |
| - Production | Handmade and for self-sufficiency. | Mass production, large quantities of identical products. The concept of a market arises where one person consumes what another produces (invisible wedge) |
| - Energy | Living and renewable batteries (man and animals) | Non-renewable resources, oil, coal and gas |
| - Transportation | It did not exist or it was very rudimentary | The ship, the plane and the railways appear due to the need to transfer the merchandise for sale |
| - Education | At home and related to work. | Schools arise with the aim of preparing students to work in the factory, for which, beyond the formal program, a covert one is introduced where punctuality, obedience and repetitive work are taught. |
| - Schedule | Biological rhythm | Synchronization with the invention of the clock appears and all activities begin to be organized by schedules. |
| - Communications | Orally or through messengers that people with sufficient resources could access. | It is considered essential, magazines, newspapers, the telephone and the telegraph appear. |
| - Information | Limited | A lot |
| - Memory | Individual | Social through books |
| - Commerce | Barter | Money and commerce proper arises |
| - Cities | They hardly existed | They appear as a consequence of the settlement of the factories and the workers who move to them. |
Second wave
Industrialism broke up society into thousands of interlocking parts (factories, churches, schools, unions, prisons, etc.) but someone had to put things together in a different way. This need gave rise to a series of specialists whose task was integration, that is, they defined their functions and assigned tasks.
- Companies: born with the criterion that the bigger, the more efficient. Commercial companies are created in order to achieve a greater contribution of capital but power is gathered in the hands of the administrators and not of the owners since the former were those who had control of the integrating process. It is at this time when the work of the technostructure begins. Basic principles: standardization, synchronization, concentration, maximization and centralization.
With the appearance of new technology, trade expands and regional economies are consolidated into a national economy. This economic integration forces political integration in the form of nations, unique and integrated and with the precept that progress was inevitable and only the fittest can survive.
The Second World War significantly reduced the size of the world market, which led to the conclusion that the industrial economy had to be rebuilt on a new basis and the United States and the Soviet Union assumed the task of reorganization.
The financial strategists of the United States organized, in 1941, the new integration of the industrial economy under the criterion that the division of jobs should be done at the international level, thus being able to obtain raw materials for their industries at a lower price. For this reason, in 1944, the IMF and the World Bank were created and a general agreement on tariffs and trade called GATT was signed.
- IMF: forced nations to link their currencies to the US dollar or gold when 72% of reserves were in the hands of that country World Bank: began to grant loans to European nations for reconstruction, to non-industrialized countries for the construction of roads, ports and docks that would favor the transfer of merchandise and facilitate trade.
Russia established a similar system called COMECOM for the nations of Eastern Europe but did not reap the benefits of its colleagues since the nations in that sector were much more industrialized than those in Latin America.
| TECHNOSPHERE | They produced and accumulated wealth as a consequence of the emergence of machines that not only generated products, but also other machines. Serial production and mass marketing. |
| PARTNER | Nuclear family and schools with covert worker training programs. |
| INFOSPHERE | Mass media with identical messages for millions of brains. |
Third Wave - Age of Knowledge
- Family: variety of families and non-marital lifestyles, increases the number of people living alone, concubinage, child-free culture, single-parent and multi-parent families, homosexual marriages, communes and contractual marriages. A diversity of options arises open to people who want different things. Job: they return to work at home mainly due to the existence of the computer, the spouses spend more time together and the children can collaborate in their tasks, the constitution of a family will have as an additional requirement intelligence, electronic home with greater comfort, family expanded by colleagues who collaborate at work and can even form small companies. The prosumer arises who manufactures things for his personal consumption and does not depend so much on the production of others. Energy: a variety of energies will emerge to replace oil, such as solar (photovoltaic cells), atomic, nuclear, wind (balloons with windmills in the troposphere and stratosphere), garbage (already used in New York), coconut waste (Philippines), maritime (floating platform in Japan that extracts energy from waves) Communication: media demassification, specialization and sectorization in publications, cable and satellite television. The excess of information will determine that the person who does not know where to look for the information they need at any given time will be illiterate. Industry
- Electronics: the devices are getting smaller and more precise. Computers: their price decreases so that each house can have one to carry out its commercial and work activity. Space: ships will be invented to travel to space, moving people and goods weekly, handling radioactive materials and alloys that cannot be manufactured here by the force of gravity, construction of space cities with materials from the Moon, etc. Genetics: research doubles every two years, manipulation of living beings, organ reproduction, disease cure, bio-agricultural reproduction, genetic modifications in man to modify his food chain and fight hunger, etc. Aquaculture: fish farming to feed people, exploration to extract minerals and fertilizers for agriculture, floating, submerged or semi-submerged cities, etc.
VOCABULARY
- Revolutionary premise: Assume that even if the coming decades will be filled with turmoil, we will not destroy ourselves. We are the final generation of a civilization and the first generation of a new civilization, and much of our disorientation is due to the change between both civilizations. Violent solution: The second wave created, by spreading through various societies, a bloody and protracted war between the defenders of the agricultural past and the supporters of the industrial future. Examples, American Civil War, Pink Revolution of 1917, etc. Living batteries: animal and human muscle power Streamline family: nuclear family Invisible wedge: all food, goods and services were intended for sale, barter or exchange. It broke the union of production and consumption, separating the producer from the consumer.
