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According to the old way, people in organizations had power if they had control over budgets or other people or both. Of course if you had neither, then you did not have power either, at least not formal power. Here, power is defined as the ability to command and control. |
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The most powerful people in these old-style organizations had both control over budgets and command of staff members, and did not have to consult with many people or even anyone before doing what they wanted to do. These very powerful people had centralized power into their own hands, and were able to exert sole discretion. (Decentralization Revealed) When something occasionally went wrong, they may even have had someone or something else to take the blame for them. |
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By the time people climbed to this level on the corporate ladder, they knew how to play the power game quite well. They knew that the object of the game was to arrange their staff and their budget so as to strengthen their position and thus increase their power. In this system, power became a means unto itself. |
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Managers found ways to justify bigger budgets and larger staffs. Those in boundary-spanning positions (like sales people), jealously guarded their contacts. Even production workers were part of this game when they guarded shop-floor knowledge from supervisors in an attempt to secure their jobs by refusing to improve productivity. But the result of all this personal power-grabbing is the reduced power of the organization to serve customers with excellence. |
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Ever larger budgets and staffs disregarded the need for increased productivity or improved quality. Bigger became better because being bigger was all that mattered. Through it all, an excessively complicated command and control strategy flourished into over-elaborated bureaucratic structures. Ironically, this increased complexity became yet another rationale for bigger budgets and larger staffs. As a result, organizations that define power in terms of size suffer many difficulties when trying to innovate or even keep up with the pace of change. As response times lag, and external factors become farther and farther removed from their context, people in these kinds of organizations loose sight of what really matters — their customers. |
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