Organizations: for and by memes
There is nothing natural about organisations, either in the private, public or third sectors. They are deliberately created and persist by perpetuation of their internal memes.
I've written a lot about organisation structures and boundaries, and I think there are two distinct types of memes in organisations:
• ‘strategic’ memes, which define what the organisation is there for and what its core values are, and what happens if the organisation forgets them;
• ‘tactical’ memes, that define how the organisation (and generally, most organisations of that type) operate.
I believe that a sign of a healthy business is a simple and consistent set of memes, and it is no surprise that the most successful businesses are often those that adhere to the purpose and direction of the founders.
But when these memes get out of balance the symptoms include any or all of stagnation, defeatism, inability to innovate, fads, excessive change, poor product quality, crushing bureaucracy and internal politics. The good news is that these can all be cured and I'll give you are some simple techniques to help you rebalance the situation.
The way you do business is not a set of commandments carved on stone tablets, but rather just a set of ideas that can be adapted or discarded as you see fit. And if the vision, values and methods of organisations are nothing more than memes, an understanding of those memes and how to alter them becomes central to the disciplines of change management and leadership.
We can also finally understand the interactions of corporate and national culture. Deep-rooted structures that can sometimes prevent us from adapting to the ways of foreign corporations, and one of the major messages from anthropologists to businessmen should be that if a person places a group’s needs over their own needs (and most of the population of the world do) then they will not subscribe to many of the management techniques taught in Western business schools.