Welcome To The Modern Workplace!

[pbrower2a]

I'm guessing that Bad Dog's employer was recently like this. Companies leaving the growth-by-innovation stage, are in what Adizes calls "aristocracy":

• Are cash rich and have very strong financial statements.
  
• Have reduced expectations for growth.
  
• Demonstrate little interest in conquering new markets, technologies, and frontiers.
  
• Focus on past achievements rather than future visions.
  
• Are suspicious of change.
  
• Reward those who do what they are told to do and punish those who do not.
  
• Are interested in reducing their risks.
  
• Invest much more on control systems, benefits, and facilities than they do on R & D.
  
• Form dominates function in the organizational climate. More emphasis is placed on how things are done, than what was done.
  
• Value uniformity, consistency and formality in dress, decorum, and behavior.
  
• Employ individuals who are concerned about the company's vitality, but are willing to abide by a "don't make waves" operating motto.
  
• Engender only negligible innovation with internal efforts.
  
• Acquire other products or companies for new products, markets, and entrepreneurship to feed into their distribution channels and operating systems.
  
• May be takeover targets themselves.
  
  

When an Aristocracy is unable to reverse its downward spiral and the artificial repairs finally stop working, management's mutual admiration society abruptly ends. The good-old-buddy days of the Aristocracy are gone, and the witch-hunts of Recrimination begin. Companies in this stage exhibit the following behaviors:

• People focus on who caused the problems, rather than on what to do about the problems.
  
• Problems get personalized. Rather than dealing with the organization's problems, people are involved in interpersonal conflicts, backstabbing, and discrediting each other.
  
• Paranoia freezes the organization.
  
• Personal survival and turf wars absorb all available energy leaving precious little to deal with the needs of customers or the world outside the organization.
  

Now what follows?

The Witch Hunt

Everyone is busy trying to find out who caused the disaster. With blades drawn, it's backstabbing time in the boardroom. Like primitive tribes afflicted by extended drought or famine, there is a rush to appease the gods. The organization needs a sacrifice. Whom does it sacrifice? The fairest maiden, the finest warrior, or the cream of the crop? Typically, the management of a company in Recrimination sacrifices its most valuable and scarcest treasure.........the last vestiges of innovation and creativity. The company fires the EVP of Marketing, explaining, "We're in the wrong market with the wrong products and our advertising does not work." The heads of Strategic Planning, Business Development and Engineering are the next to find themselves on the street. "Our strategy does not work. Our acquisitions are not working. Our products and technology are obsolete." The people who get fired don't feel they are responsible for the company's situation. The Marketing VP often said that the company ought to change its direction. The strategist has an ulcer worrying about the lack of direction. Privately, these individuals complained, urged, begged, and threatened, but their efforts were like pushing wet spaghetti up a hill. Their exodus merely exacerbates the problem because these creative people are the indivduals the organization needs most for survival.

What follows?

Although it should be dead, the company in Bureaucracy is kept alive by artificial life support. The company was born the first time in Infancy, it was reborn in Adolescence, and its third "birth" is in Bureaucracy when it gets an artificial continuance on its life. Death occurs when no one remains committed to keeping the organization alive. If there is no business or government commitment to supporting a company in Recrimination, death can occur instead of bureaucratization.

In the Bureaucratic stage, a company is largely incapable of generating sufficient resources to sustain itself. It justifies its existence by the simple fact that the organization serves a purpose that is of interest to another political and business entity willing to support it. The Bureaucratic organization:

• Has many systems and rules and runs on ritual, not reason.
  
• Has leaders who feel little sense of control.
  
• Is internally disassociated.
  
• Creates obstacles to reduce disruptions from its external environment.
  
• Forces its customers to develop elaborate approaches to bypass roadblocks.
  

Comment: things get more civilized (could they get worse than they were during the Witch hunt? Sure -- but not until the company fails). Bureaucracies delegate power and allow people to carve out niches of 'safe' zones but without producing much tangible value. The cut-throat era is over, and nobody gets fired. People retire or go elsewhere and are not replaced. Marginal types and people too old to go elsewhere remain. The company shrinks. Perhaps it owns some valuable assets like real estate or intellectual property, maybe a trademark suitable to "retro" branding. But as an operation it is worth more broken up than it is as a going concern, and it is only a matter of time before some creditor pulls the rug out from the company by selling its assets. Workers at this company have no value to the company buying the assets.

For a historical example, think of the Roman Empire in the third quarter of the 5th century AD. It still looked impressive as a political entity, but the old power system was gutted. Barbarian princes were carving out fiefdoms in the Name of the Emperor. It was costly to maintain due to the pomp and the imperial bureaucracy. In 476 the chieftain Odoacer determined that it was no longer useful and abolished it. Hardly anyone cared except the well-paid drones.