The lifecycle of businesses

[pbrower2a]

(05-21-2016, 08:27 AM)radind Wrote: The Adizes Corporate Lifecycle model looks good and provides a place to start discussion. One of my concerns is the large number of  government agencies in the bureaucratic stage. Until we find a way to overcome the bureaucratic tendencies, I would like to see old agencies abolished on some reasonable timeline( 25 to 30 years). New agencies could be started as needed to provide a totally fresh start(clean out the barnacles).
One example that comes to mind are the multiple national laboratories that were started in WWII era. They may each be doing wonderful work, but I think we could do with fewer of them  and don’t see the necessity for eternal life for such government agencies.

I did find a company with a different management structure. It will be interesting to see if this approach works long term and also see if this concept can be migrated to other organizations.

Quote:https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-...e-managers
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

… "For decades the assumption has been that the work of managing is best performed by a superior caste of formally designated managers, but Morning Star’s long-running experiment suggests it is both possible and profitable to syndicate the task to just about everyone. When individuals have the right information, incentives, tools, and accountabilities, they can mostly manage themselves.”…

… "In most companies the hierarchy is neither natural nor dynamic. Leaders don’t emerge from below; they are appointed from above. Maddeningly, key jobs often go to the most politically astute rather than the most competent. Further, because power is vested in positions, it doesn’t automatically flow from those who are less capable to those who are more so. All too often managers lose their power only when they’re fired. Until then they can keep mucking things up. No one at Morning Star believes that everyone should have an equal vote on every decision, but neither does anyone believe that one person should have the last word simply because he or she is the boss. While management’s future has yet to be written, the folks at Morning Star have penned a provocative prologue. Questions remain. Can the company’s self-management model work in a company of 10,000 or 100,000 employees? Can it be exported to other cultures? Can it cope with a serious threat, such as a low-cost offshore competitor? These questions keep Rufer and his colleagues up at night. They readily admit that self-management is a work in progress. “Ideologically, we’re about 90% of the way there,” says Rufer. “Practically, maybe only 70%.”

I believe Morning Star’s model could work in companies of any size. Most big corporations are collections of teams, departments, and functions, not all of which are equally interdependent. However large the company, most units would have to contract with only a few others. With $700 million a year in revenues, Morning Star certainly isn’t a small business, but it’s not a humongous one, either. There’s no reason why its self-management model wouldn’t work in a much larger company”….

With few exceptions, government is bureaucratic. Any government agency has elected officials to whom it is ultimately responsible and rigid rules on the expenditure of assets. Misappropriation of funds is a serious offense for which one can be fired and even co0nvicted. It is not up to a government employee to decide that some different way of allocating funds is more efficient; that is set in Washington DC, a state capital or the city or county administration. Any one of those can make a highly-centralized decision that wastes money or demands that the same solution be applied to Boston, Texas (there is such a place) as to Boston, Massachusetts. A business might decide that using pencils until people can barely handle them is more efficient or issue the edict "stop wasting paper clips". Or it can dictate routes for people traveling on company business to shave a couple miles off the compensation for mileage. 

At times there are good reasons for rigid rules, as in a prison or the military, where deviations from the rules can lead to lethal disasters.   

Government agencies do not exist to turn a profit. Any government agency that can turn a profit is suspect as a rightful role for government. We don't want the government owning and operating profitable enterprises, do we, if it is not a natural monopoly? Bureaucracies seem to be born with a sort of progeria in which they are old in their functioning even if they were formed lately, as with government agencies of any kind and such for-profit bureaucracies as insurance companies. Predictability is far more important than is innovation.

All government agencies would shrivel and die (except perhaps for some municipally-owned utilities) were it not for the funds from taxes.