In his latest post 'Species of Organisation' Henry
Mintzberg's shares his unorthodox and insightful views on the way we understand and 'discuss' organisations often unaware about how much the interplay between structures, management style, power relationships, and culture affects the company's output.
There are species of organizations just as there are species
of animals. Don’t mix them up. A bear is not a beaver; one winters in caves,
the other in wooden structures they build for themselves. Hospitals are not
factories; advertising agencies are not fast food companies.
This may seem obvious, but while we recognize the different
species of animals, we often mix up the different species of organizations. How
often have management consultants come into one kind of organization and
treated it like another—say tried to deal with a hospital the way they have
just dealt with an automobile factory. (It might work in the cafeteria, but how
about geriatrics?) Of course, we do use these kinds of words—hospitals,
advertising agencies—but they designate industries, not the nature of their organizations.
Years ago I set out to address this problem, in a book called
The Structuring of Organizations (later issued in shorter form called Structure
in Fives). It has proved to be my most successful book, for many years widely
used in schools around the world. But not successful enough: the way we discuss
organizations remains primitive. So let me offer my framework of four basic
species of organizations.
The Machine Organization Many organizations
function like well-oiled machines. They are about efficiency,
namely getting the greatest quantitative bang for the quantitative buck.
Accordingly, everything is programmed, to the finest detail—for example how
many seconds before a McDonald’s cook turns over a hamburger patty. This makes
it easy to train the workers, but not to keep these workers: their jobs can be
boring and the controls stifling. The machine organization is great at what it
does well—we want that wake-up call in the hotel at 8:00, not 8:01—but not
outside its own context. (Would you like to lift the pillow in your hotel room
and have a Jack-in-the-box jump up and say “Surprise!” You are not there to be
amused. But you are in a movie theatre, so beware of films made by machine-like
film companies.)
The Professional Organization This second
species is programmed too, but in an entirely different way. It is about
proficiency more than efficiency. In hospitals, accounting firms, and many
engineering offices, the critical work is highly skilled—it takes years of
training—yet most of the time it can be surprisingly routine. (Imagine being
wheeled into an operating room as a nurse says: “You have nothing to worry
about: this is a highly creative surgeon!”) In the professional organization,
sometimes people seem to work in teams, but in fact they are usually working
largely on their own. Everyone in that operating room is carrying out his or
her own procedures according to the predetermined protocols. More to the point,
each of the musicians in an orchestra is playing to the notes written for his
or her own instrument by Beethoven, more than responding to the conductor.
The Entrepreneurial Organization Yet we
venerate the orchestra conductor as if this is the epitome of leadership.
Again, we are mixing up species. In the entrepreneurial organization, central
leadership dominates, while in orchestras there is more going on than this, as
suggested above (and as will be discussed in the next two TWOGs). The
best examples of this species are often found in entrepreneurial firms created
by visionaries—as in the case of a Steve Jobs at Apple. Sometimes older
organizations in crisis take on this form as they centralize power around their
leadership to deal with the problem. And let’s not forget totalitarian
political regimes, like Putin’s Russia. When the boss of an entrepreneurial
organization says “Jump!” the response is “How high sir?” (When the executive
director of a hospital says “Jump”, the doctors ask “Why?” In an orchestra,
some of the musicians might have a tantrum.
The Project Organization This fourth
species is different again. Here the work is also highly skilled, but the
experts have to work in teams, to combine their efforts for the sake of
innovation. Think about film companies, advertising agencies, research
laboratories: this is found in many kinds of high tech industries. Here the
experts work on projects, to create novel outputs—a film, an ad campaign, a new
product. (Over the years I have called this species the Innovative
Organization, and Adhocracy.) To understand the project organization, and if
you are one of its managers not screw it up entirely, you have to appreciate
that it gets its effectiveness by being inefficient. Without some slack,
innovation dies.
Each of these species requires its own kind of structure, its
own style of management, very different power relationships, and so on. I have
no space to go into all of this here—an accessible reference, mentioned at the
end, does that. Let me just add that these forms don’t just HAVE different
cultures; they ARE different cultures. Walk into different ones and you can
almost smell the differences.
