Effective organizations are
organic. This means that they learn from the
environment. Ineffective organizations seal themselves
off from the environment and succeed temporarily by forcing
the environment to respond to them. Organic
organizations adapt as the environment changes-and it always
does.
A group of people planned to
start a business. Some of them were programmers, some
were specialists in communication, some of them had technical
knowledge in the field of linguistics. The programmers
were motly interested in writing and selling software.
The communication specialists were not particularly interested
in software but needed it for some purposes. The
linguists needed some software and some consultation on
communication. All of them had interests that went
beyond the common interests.
They formed three separate
businesses on the agreement that where their interests
overlapped they would form a loose association. This
structure allowed them to pursue separate lines of business
while developing the common core business. After a few
years, each of the separate bbusinesses had entered new areas
of business that none of them had considered at the beginning.
This business structure
allowed them to learn the appropriate structure as they
developed. Each separate structure was able to modify
its activities as its markets changed. In other words,
each was able to listen locally and respond in a way that a
larger, more centralized group could not have responded.
