The strategic memes of an organisation may carry its what and why, but we still need a set of memes to disseminate how they work.
The list below includes some well-known examples of tactical memes: to keep the list smaller than the remainder of the website, I have only included memes that are internal to a company as opposed to ones that relate to external memeplexes such as legal and accounting systems.
- Accounting concepts: accruals, accounting periods, ledgers, balance sheets, budgets, transfer pricing, depreciation and double-entry bookkeeping, not to mention activity-based costing or other form of hallucinatory costing or charging system
- Information collection and transmission mechanisms: timesheets, reports, sales figures, executive ‘information’, exception reporting, project/resource plans
- Leadership methods: active listening, open door, scientific management, conflict management, management-by-exception, -walking-around, -brute force, -objectives and a whole alphabet soup of ‘Theory’
- Manufacturing models: batch and job production, stockholdings, capacity planning, flow production, kaizen, kanban, lean manufacturing, mass customisation, production scheduling, maintenance planning
- Marketing: channels, customer segments, consumer behaviours, focus groups, loyalty schemes, sales quotas (etc.), account management, public relations, permission marketing, spamming, advertising and absolutely everything to do with brands
- Organisation structures: Teams, pyramids, cellular and matrix structures, virtual structures, reporting or dotted-line relationships, consortia, keiretsu, franchises, limited and public companies,co-operatives, shamrock structures, partnerships, etc.
- Performance improvement methodologies: Systems analysis, time management, process reengineering, six sigma, corporate social responsibility, any concept containing the words ‘quality’ ‘knowledge’ or ‘learning’ management, emotional intelligence, eco-anything, neurolingustic programming and any other worthless management fad
- Personnel and employee subjugation procedures: industrial relations, job evaluation, appraisals, competencies, personnel management, psychometric profiles, dress codes, training, conditions of employment, grievance procedures, exit interviews, job grades, blue versus white collar workers
- Remuneration: vacation, compassionate leave, wages, flexitime, overtime, pensions, employee share ownership, work/life balance, maternity/paternity and sick benefits, redundancy, golden handshakes….
Are these memes? Yes, because they fail the test of universality. Despite what American/European readers may think, these management mechanisms are not common to all cultures and, in fact, many of them would fail badly in Asia and Southern Europe, as we saw in the article on
If an organization's strategic memes are weak then it will fail, but fail slowly. Sets of strategic memes that don’t establish themselves well in a niche usually end up being replaced by another company’s memes in an acquisition or extinguished by the system’s bankruptcy meme.
However, even if the strategic memes are good and the vision is clear, success can still be evaded by having a bad set of tactical memes, or by having tactical memes that fail to support the strategic purpose. If the tactical memes are wrong, failure can be dramatic and sudden.
Now read: diagnosing sick organisations