Bureaucratic politics: the seventh systemic disease in organizations

A lot of buzz in an auction room. Small groups watch each other furtively. Bidding is about to start. Who will go home with what?

Maybe we should have started with this dynamic. It is so prevalent, that it often seems to be the natural condition: the way things are. Especially larger organizations are often like this: everyt issue, every plan, every decision, every action is turned into internal politics. People defend their turf, want to enlarge their turf or are eying for a next, bigger and better-paid turf. Is there an outside world? Yes, but mainly insofar it helps to define the turf, and influences who gets what money, prestige or power. Customers or clients, unless they represent big money, big prestige or big influence, are a necessary evil. They may have complaints and problems to solve, they have unrealistic expectations; basically they are a nuisance.

Is it possible to avoid or eliminate internal politics? No, it isn’t. But unattended it is a cancerous growth that will supplant all healthy tissue. It becomes especially evil when it is infected with fraud or corruption of any kind and when egotists at the top only allow other egotists to join their ranks.
What is the ideal counter-poison? Someone at the very top who has backing from external directors, with a direct interest in the services or products, in the end-users of these services and products, in the development and production of these services or products and the people who make that practically happen. Usually, but not necessarily, that person has come from the ranks.
Why is the top person so important? Isn’t that idolizing the strong man or the strong woman? No. The point is that such a person is essential to prevent people not really interested in these aspects to fill the positions below the top. The top person is not only a role model, but the only guarantee against empty careerists.

And not even that works always. Especially when the top executive is an entrepreneur who started his own company and the company becomes so big that he or she can’t handle everything anymore, such a person may be enamored by candidates for the number 2 position who come from bigger firms, often have very general backgrounds like financial and legal types. Marketing people are suspect, unless they have been in sales before. usually, marketing is for people who are too sensitive to engage in the rawer edges of the commercial world, like sales. Sales have the nasty habit that they often fail. Not all tenders are won, not every sales pitch hits home. And if you are too sensitive even for marketing? Then you can go into public relations. PR, darling, PR!

Of course both marketing and PR are legitimate functions, just like financial and legal work are. But they are more easily taken over by people with more form than substance. I have learned to watch for those managers who want to distance themselves as far as possible from the coal face, the place where real work is done. In public institutions it is often worse than in companies.
Now many companies are so big that you can’t expect top people to stay near to the primary process of developing, providing and selling products and services. There are simply too many products and services. So there the heroes are at the level of business unit managers. But size is less important than diversification. In huge companies of Shell or Apple the main products will still be known in the board room. There will be people there who actually held the new prototypes of the iPhone or know how an oil well and a refinery look like and smell.
But in a city it is possible that the manager of the sewage department has never seen or smelled a sewer and doesn’t plan to come near one.

In any organization internal politics is natural. But where reality is held at bay, internal politics take over. And good people leave, if they can. If left unstopped, the organization becomes a hollow organization, an empty legal and financial envelop. Everything is outplaced. The ideal of financial and legal types. Marketing types then preside over a collection of brands. They exploit trademarks.
When in a still large organization degeneration continues, this may change into the forth dynamic: executive psychopaths.

Perfectionism: the sixth systemic disease in organizations

A cylinder is pulled through a half-open gutter, again and again and again and again. To minimize friction, they say. It is never good enough.

This is the sixth image of a systemic disease.
Perfectionism is the exorcism of friction, the exorcism of frustration.
Imagine, still something that is not perfect! That could produce irritation. Or criticism. Or disappointment. Or failure. Imagine, being guilty of such things! Worse, shame may be involved. Perfection is the only  way to avoid all these horrors.

The search for the perfect diagnosis makes therapy obsolete. The search for perfect justice creates intolerable delays and byzantine refinements. The search for the perfect job leads to eternal dissatisfaction and job-hopping. The search for the perfect words aborts the manuscript. The search for the perfect partner leads to insupportable singles. The search for the perfect jet fighter leads to wasted billions - which is why the receivers of the billions are all crazy about perfectionism.

Perfectionism is for people who are too refined for reality. It is also a marvellous way to denounce people, their ideas, their proposals, their efforts and their results.

Beware of perfectionists! Flee them, avoid them like the plague. They are like man-eating robots: superior and unrelenting.

Perfectionism in organizations is another systemic disease. It kills humanity, consideration and what is worse: common sense. Organizations delivering top-service or top-products easily become arrogant. Nothing succeeds like success. In the short run, that is. In the long run nothing fails like success. Especially grand, momentous failure make come out of too much success.

Perfectionists have a death wish. They hate life, they hate reality. The real world is messy, people are grubby. Cleanliness may be close to godliness. But too much cleanliness is killing. Perfect plastic surgery creates dolls without character and so without attractiveness.

We can always improve quality, we can always improve productivity, we can always improve profit. Till the clients are satisfied and the makers are satisfied, the banks are satisfied and the neighbors are satisfied. And then we go one step further. And then we stop.

The only perfection that is recommendable is the perfection of being in flow. Robert Pirsig wrote about his fascination with Quality: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality, that is what it is all about. Quality, not perfection.