Business Organization: Robust or go bust?

Further ramblings on business by Kjell Øystein Arisland

(For previous ramblings, see "Intriguery", for even further ramblings, see "HHRM (anonymously)", and if you're tired of ramblings just go get AINTscience already)

Executive games: The reorganizing shuffle

It ain't easy to run a business, and many companies spend an enormous amount of time organizing and reorganizing over and over ad nauseam. Often it doesn't do much good, and the costs would have been prohibitive if anyone had known what they are.

So why do they do it?

Your guess is quite possibly better than mine, but I "know for a fact" (admittedly a little uncertainty there, maybe I should say "believe" instead, but that doesn't sound very convincing). I know for a fact that CEOs and managers quite often reorganize to assert themselves and show everyone who's the boss. In the process, shuffling functions and people around is a convenient excuse for getting rid of human thorns, pains and skeletons through the obvious need for rewriting job descriptions, sideways promotions and other tricks of the trade.

So maybe reorganizing over and over again is useful, I don't know, but I doubt it. What I do know, is that for any business organizational structure to work, it has to be properly understood by the key personnel, and probably by most of the employees in any small business.

How to document and promote understanding of company organizational structure

There are at least two common methods.

• Method 1: Let everyone find out for themselves
• Method 2: Define and describe, e.g. through charts, figures, presentations and documents

Which is chosen is largely a question of leadership style. Method 1 is quick and easy, at least for the manager, while method 2 is a lot of work. Method 1 lets the difficult people fight other difficult people instead of the management, while method 2 channels frustration and anger directly at the manager. It should not be surprising that method 1 is most widely used, but as a rule, method 2 is the official choice, usually documented in the form of a slide presentation.

For any organization to hold up under the pressure of crises, it has to be set in stone, meaning the five D-s: It is well documented, democratically discussed, debated and dismissed. Finally it is implemented, through a gentle process of discrete delegation, derogation, dismemberment and death, corporately speaking.

Having a strong and functional org­ani­zational structure is now a must, even for most small businesses, and the average window of time for corrective action from danger signs appear to the point of no return is steadily diminishing. Improving organi­za­tion documentation and communi­cating it effectively every day are equally necessary precautions against getting caught in self-strengthening spirals of de­struct­ive forces that could obliterate any organization. It's a dog eat cat world out there, and you don't want to be that dog, or cat.

In short, in this day and age you need a strong, robust organizational structure, which means you need AINTscience to organize the files according to the structure. This creates a model of the organization itself in the file system hierarchy, and this model is used every day by many people, and so on. Very useful stuff, models.

Now, we're not saying that AINTscience is a tool for documenting a business organization, AINTscience is a methodology for organizing files, not businesses. On the other hand, businesses and business documents are known to frequently be related, and organizing one can easily affect the other. In fact one may kill two flies in one swat by using the same structure for both, and that's one of the basic ideas of AINTscience. There are several more useful ideas, concepts and methods, and they are yours for a few dollars.