Evolution of Formal Organizations.

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An Insight on Conventional Bureaucracy and Open Organizations

The research you are asked to do in this particular essay revolves around the social dynamics of a formal organization. Formal organizations as we have discussed on your earlier post follow an organizational & power hierarchy based on competence and responsibility. Organizational structures are the basis of today's civilized world. We could even venture out in fact that without an organized system, the world as we know it (how it works, how responsibility flows in civil and social systems) will fall apart. Organizations exist to perform tasks, to provide services, to achieve goals ---- they are necessary in the development and maintenance of social systems we live in: our communities, nations, societies, towns, cities, villages. A bureaucratic organizational structure is usually that which is followed within government agencies & organizations. The FBI, the CIA, the Congress, the Department of Health, etc. Organizations in systems like this exist to support the community and the nation to keep it running, provide the citizenry with goods and services necessary for living the lives they do. These organizations overlap at times or are centered around each other. Think of the Central Government as a circle and supporting organizations are smaller circles around it that in turn are surrounded by other organizations. To run a behemoth system like this --- Rules and regulations are imposed to the letter. Sure, primary relationships are harnessed within between members of the organization. However, to remain in one's job as a judge, a lawyer, a doctor, a congressman, a governor --- you will have to perform according to what is expected of you. Reward for the services exchanged come in wages just like any employment-based institutions but with this comes accountability. The President for instance is accountable to all, so is the traffic police officer. Without strict bureaucratic systems where work and responsibilities are clearly defined, managing a country would be impossible.

Why is this the case however? How come it is always the conventional system that is being followed in the government or any goal-oriented behemoth systems? The answer is simply because this system is proven throughout history as something that really works. When we look back to the time of Ancient Rome and Greece, creating empires mean coming up with a system of dividing responsibilities and achieving goals through a power structure. Leadership has become more than just a choice, it is a must and good leaders become Emperors, most of them military generals who used the organizational system of the Roman Army and adapted it to power sharing in the Senate as well as using it to govern far flung provinces from Britannia to Egypt. Bureaucratic Organizational structures exploit skills and speciality, maximizing the capacity of an individual by placing him where he is needed with everybody being accountable to somebody else and ultimately to the people they serve. In the corporate world, banks and financial services systems adopt a bureaucratic structure so do behemoth multinational companies like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Unilever. Imagine running a company like Pepsi with offices in every corner of the globe whose products can be found in the Himalayas and the Saharan Oases --- a structure where all employees know their roles and exactly what to do must be in place or it is impossibility. The Pepsi bottlers in Cambodia speak Khmer , their Chinese counterpart Mandarin (and so it goes for all of Pepsi's representative businesses worldwide) whereas the mother company in the US speaks English as corporate language (formal) yet they deliver the same product that just about anyone in the world who has a dollar can drink.

Now, let's talk about Google. Google by Page and Brin started out as postgraduate project between these two. They were not only research partners, they were also friends. Their idea to create an efficient search engine that crawls through the web faster than anything that came before it is phenomenal and attracted the attention of investment companies who knew that given the chance, Google will work and is bound to be a good investment. To investors and clients Page, Brin and the nucleus of 'Google founders' they started out with would communicate in a formal manner, such is the language of business. Signing documents, agreements, financial arrangements mean following that system. However, when discussing among themselves, although the shared responsibility is their, the Google nucleus tend to have a flexible and open system --- meaning that although they have set rules in place (one of them being that only brilliant minds get to work with Google) the work teams around them are a beehive of activity and at times almost autonomous to each other reporting straight to Senior managers and at times even to Page and Brin. Google's main HQ Google campus has that small company feel, where employees address each other as "Hey, " or "Dude," and everyone feels like a contributor. ...