The organisation as a machine and the design of its departments
Contents
The organisation as a machine and the design of its departments
Strategy formation and its implementation are the two central functions of top management teams and the coordination of their supervisory boards, boards of directors. And this in the traditional understanding in the sense of the implicit, i.e., even here already unreflected, assumption of a linear process, the basic ideas of which we already find in Max Weber’s goal‐means‐relation. (Weber, 1976)
The traditional team composition at top management level and on boards, as well as the way they work, still fundamentally follows the logic of functional responsibility and the professional diversity understood in this way, the means of which it is in order to meet the purposes that arise in each case. The basic figure of this thinking is oriented in principle to the idea that organisations are at best complicated machines. Their additive, linear and sequential or separated juxtaposition or, at best, simultaneous juxtaposition of individual process steps would ultimately produce the desired output through the use of appropriately skilled departmental managers. Supporting functions (e.g., HR, marketing, corporate communication) are called upon along the so‐called core processes. But according to this conception they do not make any substantial contributions to value creation. In addition, the so‐called overall responsibility, i.e., the care for emergent aspects of organisational value creation, is usually assigned to the CEO function as a kind of unexplained remainder. As a rule, the strict departmental principle applies. (cf. Dierke & Houben, 2013, 48 pp.). And, thus, the CEO function classically remains trapped in overall responsibility, while for the rest of the ›team‹ within its dispositions it remains an ultimately irrelevant matter.
