postaday2011 | Bulldozer00's Blog

It Has To Be This Way

January 1, 2011 bulldozer00 Leave a comment

This Fortune blarticle, “When you’re the boss, who gives you reviews?”, starts out with:

“A chief executive at a fast growing tech start-up recently approached executive coach Dave Kashen with an all-too common problem. The CEO frequently reached out to his executive team for feedback, but whenever he sought their opinions, his subordinates seemed to shut down and withdraw.”

Well, duh. This systemic behavior is the result of the cultural environment that CCH forms of governance auto-install into each bozone layer – all the way down the pyramidal stack. In corpo CCHs, the dudes at level N-1 are “taught” by the system to be subservient to their bosses at level N. Dudes at level N-2 are “taught” to be even more subservient to the bosses at level N than their own boss man at level N-1.

This “that’s just the way it has to be” indoctrination is so successful that it works the other way too. The dudes at level N are “taught” by the system to require subservience by the lessers at all levels below them. I wonder if the flustered CEO in the quote realizes this.

If the corpo system wasn’t designed to work this way, there would be anarchy and annihilation. No “ifs“, “ands“, or “buts” about it……… right?

Categories: management Tags: company culture, hierarchy, linkedin, organizational behavior, postaday2011

FOSTMA And NASHMA

December 31, 2010 bulldozer00 5 comments

Whoo Hoo! I thought of a positive complement to my negative FOSTMA acronym. It’s, it’s, it’s….. NASHMA = Nayar, Semler, Hsieh MAnagement:

Of course, in order to prevent chaos, NASHMA orgs still have hierarchical structures, but they’re not run as stratified caste system CCHs. In NASHMA orgs, there’s real, two way accountability; and symmetric relationships exist up and down all levels. Most managers in NASHMA groups are PHORs and not STSJs who spend all their “valuable” time planning, watching, controlling, and evaluating.

Now mind you, to avoid the trap of dualistic thinking, an org shouldn’t be judged as fully belonging to one class or the other. There can be pockets of FOSTMA groups in a NASHMA org and vice versa. Nevertheless, my scientifically collected and analyzed data revealed this current distribution of institutions along the FOSTMA-NASHMA continuum:

Over time, hopefully the threshold will move to the left – increasing the currently miniscule NASHMA to FOSTMA ratio. However, there will always be powerful and scary psychological forces opposing the movement.