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Executive Interviews: Interview with Mark Buchanan on 21st Century Organization
December 2007
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
First, a word about your book, The
Social Atom:Why The Rich Get Richer,
Cheater Get Caught, and Your
Neighbor Usually Looks Like You. A
fairly long title! Whats the short story
of this book?
The short story is that we can
understand the human world and all
its surprises better if we learn to think
of patterns, not people. We have been
brainwashed to think that its
individual human complexity that
makes the social world complicated.
But it's not. From persisting
segregation to strange movements of
markets or waves of hysteria, people
act in fairly simple ways, and its the
patterns thatwell up among themthat
make the socialworld rich and hard to
fathom.
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The situation is very much
akin to physics, where the atoms are
relatively simple, and its the patterns
among them that scientists work
hardest to understand. But the real
message is that scientists are now
really beginning to think "patterns,
not people," and social science is
becoming a lot more scientific and
powerful as a result. The book offers a
snapshot of what's going on.
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How come a journey from Ph. D in
physics to a world of business? What
triggered this shift? How has been the
journey?
Physics is away of thinking clearly, of
trying very hard to understand the
cause and effect, and making sure the
data really backs you up. This can
apply to almost anything. -
What according to you are the three
most important changes that have
altered theway business is carried out
across the globe in the last decade?
How do you think companies have
responded to these changes?Are there
any good examples of companies that
have adapted effectively to these
changes?
The changes I think are fairly obvious:
globalization and technology. The
world has really become smaller, and
business spans the globe like never
before, so both opportunities and
problemin one part of the world have
immediate effects far away. The
second thing is technology (which has
of course played a large role in driving
globalization). Many businesses, from
automakers to microchip
manufacturers, have taken advantage
of technology to streamline their
production processes beyond
anything imaginable 30 years ago. -
If you have to point out similar
changes in the "organizational" front,
whatwould those be?What have been
the triggers for such changes?
On the organizational front, I think
we are lagging behind. Companies still
act on the basis of fine sounding
theories based on little evidence, and
most mergers and acquisitions still
underperform. One thing we've
become better at, clearly, is having
more responsive and decentralized
businesses, which use the skills of
many employees more effectively. -
Since Peter Drucker wrote his
seminal work, The Concept of
Corporation in 1946 after his study at
General Motors, organizations have
undergone a metamorphosis in terms
of the structure, the defining
responsibilities of organizations,
expectations from organizations, etc.
What does the 21st Century
Organization signify to you? What is
your ideal organization in the coming
decades?
I am not sure I have an ideal
organization. But perhaps one thing I
see as important is an organization
that looks beyond the narrow
economics based view of profits or
return to investors as the only reason
for its existence. Few of us live that
way in our individual lives, so its
strange that we've thought this was
the way organizations should be.
That's been the dire influence of
traditional economic thinking, which
now looks like a rather great
embarrassment. Effective
organizations will make money,
surely, but they also must persist by
maintaining cooperative relations
among their employees and provide a
place where those employees can
collectively pursue far reaching aims,
beyond merely getting a paycheck. -
How do you define organizational
effectiveness? Has its connotation
undergone any change over the years,
across the industries? How should
this be measured? What are the
yardsticks for measuring
organizational effectiveness?
See answer to previous question. Its
not just the bottom line. -
Suddenly there seems to be an
unusual focus on social networks and
patterns of social networks.Why have
the social networks become so
important in an organizational
context?
Social networks have always been
important. Almost everything
humans have done well through
history has come frompeopleworking
together, rarely through individual
genius. But technology hasmade it far
easier to connect to others, and also to
see those connections and think about
them. Now that our networks span
large distances and nations its more
obvious how important they are, and
that these networks bring crucial
skills or information into our reach. -
In The Science of Subtle Signals, you
observe that, "anyone in business
knows through painful experience the
pervasive problems that exist because
our knowledge of organizations is imperfect." What are these pervasive
problems and why do you think the
knowledge of organizations is
imperfect?
These problems include the things
that people who ve worked in
business know all too well. Divisions
of a company don't communicate, or
fight with one another, or duplicate
efforts. Power rivalries between
individuals alone undermine the
smooth working of an organization.
Creative teams that become bogged
down because it becomes too risky to
their own internal standing in an
organization; to continue taking the
risks need to be really creative. I think
our knowledge of these things is
imperfect, indeed almost nonexistent,
because most of this stuff
happens in ways that we cannot
measure.
1.
Semco - A 'Maverick' Organization Case Study
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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