We are in constant relationship with many organizations. Our world is submitted to regular changes as organizations evolve, come and go. Understanding your memberships and attachments to organizations will help you act on your world. You'll learn how to evaluate the influence of organizations around you and how to transform your relationships to reach a stronger coherence. Do you feel sometime that the world around you is disorganized? Can you make sense of all the information at your reach and have an impact on this situation? Have you ever thought that this conundrum may be due to all the organizations that emerge, strive or wane, and disappear every day? Organizations are ubiquitous, from clubs and associations to firms and public agencies. Organizations confer meaning to all of us, and our attachment and membership to organizations have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. But in our increasingly turbulent world, these organizations run the risk of disappearing or losing their legitimacy, steering a sense of pointlessness and absurdity. This course develops an integrative approach to understanding organizations and their behaviors, termed ‘orgology’. It explains that organizations can act strategically to protect and renew the sense of membership and attachment of individuals. So doing, organizations that survive and thrive impose their logics of action onto society, thereby influencing what is legitimate or not. In turn, individuals, you, all of us, must reinterpret our multiple associations with organizations and contribute to reinforce or inhibit social evolutions. This new way of understanding organizations’ relationships with society results in reconsidering management and the role of individuals in building their future. There is no prerequisite to this course, you are all welcome ! Students and people interested in the fields of management, sociology, strategy, economics leadership etc… will benefit a lot from this course. For the session of this course starting on January 11th, Professor Rodolphe Durand will actively be participating and interacting with learners. He will be offering "office hours" sessions through google hangouts and answering learner questions from the forums. We hope this direct interaction will add to your learner experience! Please enroll today!
4.2 Time to Reorganize: Engage!
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En provenance du cours de HEC Paris
Time to Reorganize! Understand Organizations, Act, and Build a Meaningful World.
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À partir de la leçon
Understanding Change: Time to Reorganize
How to define your attachments and memberships in this organizational world? What are the various paths of actions that are opened to you following different situations? What is and how to use management?
Rencontrer les enseignants
Rodolphe DurandStrategy Professor. GDF-SUEZ Chair holder.
Strategy and Business Policy department.
We've seen previously that you, as an individual, entertain many memberships
and attachments with organizations,
and that these define your world as much as it defines you in this world.
We have pointed out that there is no need to look for
an absolute coherence in these arrangements.
Yet, because organizations come and go, it is crucial that you
are able to identify where meaning is present and where it is not.
One possible way to understand this presence, or
on the contrary lack of meaning, and to act upon, is to engage.
What are the dimensions to consider in order to qualify the type of
engagement in an organization that would bring meaning to your world?
So, let's consider these two different dimensions.
The first one is to evaluate the situation of your organization.
We have seen that organizations evolve over time, surging and
then disappearing for many of them.
So, assessing whether the organization is at risk, or
not, must be one of the dimensions to consider.
Organization at
risk.
Here you have two situations, low and high risk.
And the second dimension
to consider,
to ponder, is
how well it follows its logic of action.
So you have here
logic of action followed, and here
you consider the high risk or low risk situation.
So let me first consider this quadrant,
in the situation where the organization to which you belong
is at a low risk, and where the logic of action it follows is also at a low risk,
so a very low likelihood of change.
We call this action <b>surf the wave</b>.
What does it mean?
Let me give you an example.
We talked earlier in the course
about IBM, the company that for over a century has remained the leader in its sector.
From its very inception, IBM has followed the logic of the market and
has evolved over time, by buying out rivals and partner companies and
by selling out the businesses that were not performing anymore.
The logic of the market is far from being at risk, so
that's why here we have a low risk.
Right?
And, on the contrary, it keeps gaining importance in our world.
Likewise, IBM is strongly rooted in its economic landscape, and
it's not really at risk either.
Therefore when purchasing a new entity, IBM
oftentimes ensures that all the new entrants in the organizations are briefed and
informed on the company's inner workings, a process often referred
to, in derision, as <i>blue washing</i> blue for IBM, the blue company.
The employees are, during all the time they spend in
these training sessions, reminded that what will matter most in
their careers will be their capacity to surf the wave, that is,
their abilities to reach and grab opportunities within the IBM universe.
Surfing the wave, in short,
is making sure that all opportunities are sought and acted upon, when identified.
Surf the wave is also therefore a way to engage in or
collaborate with an organization, when neither its logic of action nor
its competitive situation is at risk.
So, let me move to the second Situation, where the logic
of action followed by the organization is at low risk, but the organization, itself, is at risk.
This situation,
we could call it <b>take power.</b>
And to give an illustration, we could talk about the evolution of Pixar,
the animation studio.
The company underwent many changes
before becoming what it is today, Disney's cutting age computer animation studio.
Back to its foundation in '74, a millionaire,
Alexander Schure, hired Ed Catmull, fresh out of the University of Utah,
to animate a children's story with computer graphics.
In '79, Catmull and his team joined Lucasfilm to spearhead the development of
hardware and software for computer animated special effects.
Pixar at the time was really focused on development of CGI tools.
In '84, Catmull, feeling the company needed strong animation short features,
in order to demonstrate the potential of the developed tools,
hired John Lasseter from Disney.
In '86, Steve Jobs purchased the company from Lucasfilm for $10 million.
Yet, even though the products the company sold were widely recognized in Hollywood,
it was finding a hard time turning out a profit.
Up until '91, he had had to sink into it an additional $40 million.
So ten originally plus $40 million.
That year, while Catmull and Jobs were trying to find ways to turn the company around,
John Lasseter took power.
He saw that a firm,
in which he had worked for several years, was at risk,
although the logic it was following was a good one, and did not need to be changed.
Lasseter contacted his former bosses at Disney, among others
Jeff Katzenberg, head of Disney's animation department, and
proposed that Pixar would produce full-length computer-generated animation movies.
Disney was listening.
Jobs and Catmull ironed out the deal with Disney, and
Lasseter started working on the project.
All along the Pixar story, Lasseter and
Catmull have never compromised on the logic of action
followed by the artists for the benefit of the logic of the market.
Strong stories
and arts are needed,
and the systematic use of a performance test measured only in financial terms
is not always beneficial in the end, in this example.
The result of the change was that Toy Story, the famous animation movie,
came out in '95 and broke all records.
Upon the purchase of Pixar by Disney, eventually, in 2006, both Catmull and
Lasseter were propelled at the head of Disney animation studio,
and enforced their view on how animation production was to be conducted.
Successes followed one another, culminating recently with Frozen, the movie which,
again, broke the box office record for animation movie.
So in this situation, you really have,
when you engage, to take power.
The logic of action followed, is at low risk, but the organization is at risk,
so when you engage: take power.
Let's move to the upper line, and so we here again have two situations.
This time, as you see, the logic followed,
logic of action followed by the organization is at risk.
High risk.
The first example, the first situation here,
we would call it <b>support your logic</b>.
The organization is not really at risk, although the logic is at risk, so
here a clear choice you have is to support your logic.
Let me give you an example.
As we said, the individual is rather powerless to act on the world
when considered alone.
This is something that Ben Rattray, founder of change.org, noted and
decided to act upon.
Change.org is a social network that enables any individual to
write down an online petition and to ask for
the endorsement and support of all members of the network.
In France in early 2014, the platform,
which serves as a virtual public space, was used by small and
medium business entrepreneurs to fight against what they believed was
excessive taxation schemes carried by the, the new government in place.
So the logic they were pursuing was at risk,
based on this new taxation schemes.
To fight against what they felt was an unacceptable encroachment of the logic of
the state on their logic of the market,
they banded together by using change.org, and
by relaying their message through other social networks, Facebook, Twitter, etc.,
in the end they managed to have the government back down.
Change.org is therefore, and before all, a tool to
support the logic of action that one deems appropriate, but currently misled.
It serves as a conveyor of a public cause, and by doing so
responds to the call of a logic of public good.
This is what has guided Ben Rattray's ambition from the start.
Last case.
Your organization, you created or
you're part of, is at risk, and the logic is also contested.
See in that case, we think that the best action to take
is to what we call </b>Hybridize</b>.
Let me give you another example
for this case.
In 2006,
Muhammad Yunus was granted the Nobel Peace Prize, as you may know.
It was the very first time the prize was awarded to a person working on
a central economic activity, which was banking.
The achievement of Yunus was to define and
launch microcredit banking in his home country, Bangladesh.
And, following the success of his bank, the Grameen Bank, to advocate for
the generalization of such practices worldwide.
Yunus worked for the government in various capacities.
He observed that logic of the state alone could not fight
against poverty efficiently.
He also observed that charity is not the best solution to poverty.
In fact, to him charity is <i>"a means to avoid recognizing the problem and
<i>finding the solution for it.</i>
Quote.
Poorly applied charity avoids submitting the use of people's gifts to
a test of performance, thereby shutting them out from the logic of the market, and
potentially from beneficial investments.
What Yunus saw
is that you can't apply the exact same test to the wealthy as to the poor.
Lending money at high interest rates to poor people,
because their risk perceived is high,
is counterproductive and leads to a dead end.
The base of microcredit has been to hybridize.
At the same time, the logic of the market,
through loans with the logic of public goods
targeting smaller entities, villages and more precisely women and families.
By lending them smaller amounts of money,
at rates lower than what they could access otherwise, the Grameen Bank has helped
to launch economic activities in places where this seemed impossible before.
Therefore, here you have the possibility to
combine parts of the logics,
the one that is at risk with another one.
Therefore, you see the different actions,
in terms of engagement that you can undertake,
based on two dimensions
that I hope would be helpful for you:
The first one being organization at risk,
the other one talking about the logic itself,
logic of action, being at risk.
So I have a quiz for you.
My first question to you
is the following: what are the dimensions that you need to take into account,
to determine your type of engagement in an organization?
-Organizational risk and logic of action diffusion.
-Organizational risk and logic of action risk.
-Organizational diffusion and logic of action risk.
-Or organizational diffusion and logic of action diffusion.
Yes, you remember correctly, the answer is the second one.
The type of your engagement would depend at the same time on the strengths and
the pertinence of the logic of action, its level of risk,
as much as the current health of the organization.
I have a second question for you.
Here is the grid with the two main dimensions.
Remember, we came to the observation of four possible ways to engage.
Support, hybridize, surf the wave, and take power.
Please place on the chart
the position of each action.
And here is the solution.
Engaging is one way of acting to mend your world,
to manage your organizational memberships and attachments.
Another consists of resisting,
of finding ways to stand against what you believe is wrong for the organization, but
also for the way you perceive your world, as we shall see next week.
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