These days, I am reading a few pages of “Arm und Reich” (Poor and Rich) by Jared Diamond every day.
There is quite a bit on the origin of agriculture and farming in this book. It as a long, initially unintentional, later controlled process that led to cultivation and domestication of plants and domestic animals.
At the moment, I also suffer more each day due to the malfunctioning of basic processes in huge enterprises.
And I am getting the impression that enterprise processes developed in a similarly evolutionary way to agriculture and farming. The “build-up organization” was relatively simple. The model of the German Reichswehr was good enough (see for example Werner von Siemens).
The process organization, i.e. the workflow and entrepreneurial processes, however, developed and changed parallel with the enterprise culture over many decades in huge German enterprises. They even survived two world wars – and basically remained intact and worked quite well
Today, I see many processes mal-functioning in DAX-oriented enterprises. This does not really come as a surprise to me. Firstly, in the last few years, a competition seems to have started among companies trying to throw overboard whatever used to work well. Doing this, little time is wasted on deliberations, and goals tend to be very one-sided
This worked well for some time, because people kept the show going on through their know-how, regardless of obstacles. Personal dedication served to counterbalance systematic loops. But now, that, too, is gone.
So it hardly comes as a surprise that nothing works as it used to.
RMD
(translated by EG)
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