Organisation Structure

 Structure follows strategy, someone has said. But structure does play a major part in any organisation. A family can be patriarchal or matriarchal or neither. That makes a difference to how it functions. Same is the case with an organisation.

Top-down decision makers like the Army work differently from a grassroots driven organisation like a few NGOs or cooperatives. Decentralisation is possible through SBUs or Strategic Business Units, if it's a large organisation. But the style of leadership and decision making plays a role there too.

In other words, structure is the beginning, but not the end, of the story.

Performance of the organisation depends on all these.

A Class Act

This is about some typical students in a typical class of MBA students. They could be from any place or Pradesh. (Cluster analysis was not used and no students were hurt during writing of this post).

Sugar and Spice: Sweet when it suits them, and hot and spicy when it doesn't.

The Advisors: Full of advice (for you), not knowing it's a vice.

The Budweisers: Well, you get the picture. No advice.

The jargon-throwers: Flame-throwers are passe. They know the latest.

The Mobile Set: They think being on the mobile makes them upwardly-mobile even before the first job.

The Hands-up Fraternity: As if there's a mugger in a dark alley trying to mug them, their hands are always up, for anything and nothing.

The Performance-watchers. Passive audience, as if in a play or a movie. Might applaud a good piece of theatrics, but won't talk.

The Questioning, the hurt, the sleepy, the eager-to-get-out and do more interesting stuff-the look says it all. The worst of all-the Killer Look!

Actual Experience Minus Expectation

There is a theory in Services Marketing that the Satisfaction of a Service customer for any kind of service is given by a formula Perception of Performance- Expectation. If Perception of actual service experience is higher than expectations, the customer is satisfied. Could be true of life as well. Karma with zero expectation would probably sound outrageous to most of us, but isn't that what the famous four lines from the Bhagvad Gita advocate?

But that (lowering of expectations) applies only to "rewards" that one expects, and not to the quality brought to the doing of the job. There are intangible gains from anything done well. A smile of gratefulness, a burp of satisfaction (from a belly you filled with your cooking), a hug from a child you told a story to, or a look of understanding (rare though it may be) from a student you have been teaching.

My favourite example of expectation and its impact is from films. Sholay was one of the best things to happen in the Hindi film industry. But expectations from Ramesh Sippy (the director of Sholay) were sky-high after that, and he could never again meet them, not with Shaan (not a bad movie) or any other film he made since. So, the flip side of doing well, be aware, is that it will raise expectations from you for the next time. Not such a bad thing, really, for quality improvement.