Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman: In Search of Excellence

The Belgian Surrealist René Magritte painted a series of pipes and entitled the series Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). The picture of the thing is not the thing. In the same way, an organization chart is not a company, nor a new strategy an automatic answer to corporate grief. We all know this; but like as not, when trouble lurks, we call for a new strategy and probably reorganize. And when we reorganize, we usually stop at rearranging the boxes on the chart. The odds are high that nothing much will change. We will have chaos, even useful chaos for a while, but eventually the old culture will prevail. Old habit patterns persist. At a gut level, all of us know that much more goes into the process of keeping a large organization vital and responsive than the policy statements, new strategies, plans, budgets, and organization charts can possibly depict. But all too often we behave as though we don't know it. If we want change, we fiddle with the strategy. Or we change the structure. Perhaps the time has come to change our ways… Way back in 1962, the business historian Alfred Chandler wrote Strategy and Structure, in which he expressed the very powerful notion that structure follows strategy. And the conventional wisdom in 1977, when we started our work, was that Chandler's dictum had the makings of universal truth… But as we explored the subject, we found that strategy rarely seemed to dictate unique structural solutions. Moreover, the crucial problems in strategy were most often those of execution and continuous adaptation: getting it done, staying flexible. And that to a very large extent meant going far beyond strategy to issues of organizing-structure, people, and the like. So the problem of management effectiveness threatened to prove distressingly circular. The dearth of practical additions to old ways of thought was painfully apparent. It was never so clear as in 1980, when U.S. managers, beset by obvious problems of stagnation, leaped to adopt Japanese management practices, ignoring the cultural difference, so much wider than even the vast expanse of the Pacific would suggest.