14 - From Principles of Excellent Organizations to Organizational 'Virtues'
The Authors refer to "In Search of Excellence," a tradebook on management that has been wildly successful since its publication in 1982. The problem was that the book lacked a clear methodology and was "not even based on fact." Some years later, one of the authors admitted that the eight principles of organizational management were something he came up with "by closing his eyes and thinking" and that much of the data supporting them had been faked. Nevertheless, the book became a pattern for the way people thought and wrote about business.
This aside, ambiguity and paradox remain compelling, even as notional theories without empirical evidence, as they seem to well describe many of the problems that managers face - particularly in situations where success requires finding a position between two contradictory extremes.
Simultaneous Loose-Tight
The authors use the metaphor of "tight" for firms that maintain rigid top-down control and constrain the activities of workers to tightly regulated processes and procedures. Such an organization can be highly efficient, but innovation is effectively prevented. On the opposite extreme is an organization that is "loose" and allows employees a great deal of latitude - which tend to be very creative and innovative, but have a hard time producing anything.
To find a happy medium between these extremes, some firms create a department in which employees "innovate" (typically, the R&D laboratory). That is, they are not part of the common workforce who accomplish the daily business of the firm, but instead spend their days in an unstructured manner, dreaming up new ideas for the form to adopt. The problem with such an approach is that the clique of "dreamers" are so far removed from the "doers" that their ideas are impracticable.
An approach that other companies, such as Google, Genentech, Honda, and 3M apply is to encourage staff to use a certain amount of their time on their own projects, enabling the "doers" who have a practical perspective to step back from their work and consider how it might be done better. Innovations such as Post-it notes, the World Wide Web, integrated circuits, and bubble gum were all invented by common working people, not artists of visionaries, who were given some slack time to think.
It's suggested that a paradigm that considers paradox may be easier to introduce than one that does not - in that the paradox does not dismiss current norms with contempt and demand the immediate substitution of the new. Instead, it acknowledges the value of current norms and suggests a more gradual move away from them as an extreme, without abandoning them entirely. This facilitates adoption and enables firms to make a more gradual transition into unfamiliar practices, rather than being expected to make dramatic overnight changes.
Icarus, Aristotle and the Virtue of Virtues
The authors refer to "The Icarus Paradox," coined by a Canadian academic, who suggested that companies are emboldened by success into taking on greater amounts of risk, until they fail horribly.
This, in turn, stems back to the bases of Greek morality, which was based on a number of opposing virtues and vices, with the warning that unless a virtue is tempered or balanced against its vice, it can become harmful. For example, courage is balanced by fear, such that if a person is completely devoid of fear, his courageousness becomes foolhardiness