If we won't tolerate badly designed products in our lives (MS Windows notwithstanding), why do we tolerate badly designed businesses? When you consider the relative importance in our lives of that from which we derive our livelihood, we should have far less tolerance for dysfunction at work than we do at home.

The problem is that dysfunctional organizational environments is mostly all we've ever known.

The great anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his classic book The Silent Language said that "culture is largely invisible to its participants." In our lifetimes there has been much research and education and popular awareness of corporate cultures. However, what has remained invisible is the culture of business.

For those who are not conversant with the concept, culture can be thought of as that set of beliefs and assumptions about reality that order all personal and social activities. In the culture of business, there are many assumptions which are never seriously questioned. An example would be how many direct reports a manager should have. The rule of thumb is six to eight. No one questions job costing as a legitimate accounting technique.

As a reality check, i personally know a CEO of a $600M company who has 500 direct reports and the people who invented job costing were very aware that it introduces very serious distortions into understanding how companies make money.

One of the great failings of Western culture is that we tend to fixate on symptoms when systems are dysfunctional (like our health) rather than striving to understand what the underlying causes are that are giving rise to the observable symptoms. Nowhere is this more true than in organizational life.

We have created a massive infrastructure of consultants, writers and thinkers who exhort us to have emotional intelligence, have fierce conversations, understand the five dysfunctions of a team, be one minute managers and remain calm when someone moves our cheese. This infrastructure virtually without exception if focused on treating symptoms and never really asks the hard question, "What is it about the way in which we have designed businesses, leadership and management that is giving rise the the many dysfunctions of which anyone who has spent any time in any kind of organization is intimately aware?"

Asking this question, brings to visibility, the heretofore invisible layer of business culture. It puts us in the uncomfortable position of having to question our most sacred assumptions, to bump off our sacred cows, to throw ourselves into the non-linear space of not knowing.

Most people do not find this a happy experience.

Sadly most of us are willing to accept the corrosive effects of chronic pain of living with dysfunction for the short spike of acute pain of working through the unknown and arriving at a new way of being and doing in which the dysfunctions have disappeared.

We know that organizations cannot remain static. The world is changing rapidly and organizations that fail to adapt and evolve become obsolete and incapable of delivering adequate value to their constituents to survive. The Quality disciplines (TQM, Six Sigma, Lean) are powerful tools and have had a huge impact on our ability to do more with less.

In recent years, the body of work that perhaps has come closest to challenging the norms of business culture has been Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. If you haven't read The Goal, It's Not Luck, and Critical Chain, you need to do so.

But the issue remains that from a design standpoint, if organizations were better designed, we would not have to deal with the incredible dysfunctions that organizations manifest and I would make the case that we cannot remotely afford the cost of these dysfunctions in what is rapidly becoming a just-in-time world.

How do we attack this problem? The starting point is to realize the assumptions that went into the design of what i call traditional management practice.

The inventors of management as we know it were 19th century intellectuals whose worldview was Newtonian, that is they understood the universe to be a cosmic machine. At some levels this understanding was accurate, but a long way from complete.

We now know the universe is self-organizing and that below it's more superficial machine-like qualities, creation is much more complex and unpredictable. The fact that Complexity Theory has shown us that all systems have a natural propensity to self-organize should help us begin to see how we need to attack the redesign of organizations, leadership and management.

The key elements are how we structure organizational relationships, how we compensate, how we provide feedback, how we educate, train and orient our employees.

If you look at traditional management practice from the point of view of Complexity Theory, it becomes apparent that much of traditional management is designed to prevent self-organization. Surely it makes more sense to design organizations which swim with the currents of how the universe appears to actually work rather than against them.

1. Attitude is everything.  It's easy to get discouraged when things slow down, but it's useful to remember that recessions are the most important things that happen in the life of a business.  Why?  Because it is only in a recession that you learn what you really need and really don't need to make your business work.  Prosperity can hide all manner of ills in your business.  So step one is get your head on straight and see this as an opportunity.  Your company needs to be a victim free zone.  You're not going to die over this so take a deep breath and do the work.
2. Scrutinize all your expenses.  Ask yourself, "If we got rid of this would it impact quality or service to the customer?"  Ditching something might impact convenience for you, but that convenience may not be something you can afford right now.  Along with your expenses, look closely at your processes to eliminate waste.  If you aren't familiar with process improvement, get educated.  Read W. Edwards Deming's Out of the Crisis, the father of the quality disciplines who taught the Japanese how to do it or any of the other excellent books on the subject.
3. Increase your market penetration.  You can't really save your way to prosperity since there is only so much cutting you can do without cutting your own throat, so increasing your market penetration is the answer.  When times are good, it's easy to go into cruise control.  It has been my experience that increasingly there are only two kinds of businesses: kick-ass marketing companies and companies that work for kick-ass marketing companies.  Guess who makes the money.  If you are not a marketer by nature, learn to think like a marketer.  Read Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerilla Marketing books.  There are many others relevant to entrepreneurs.  You probably don't care how Proctor & Gamble does it...that's a different world.  You need to learn how entrepreneurs do it.  Remember, even in a recession, there is massive amounts of money changing hands.  Your job is to figure out how to get your piece of it.  A logical starting point is to work your way up the food chain with your customers.  (More on that in another post.)
4. Look at the internet.  I don't care what business you're in, if you aren't taking advantage of connecting with customers or prospective customers on the web then shame on you.  You're asleep at the switch.  If you don't know where to start, call Tom Walker at Web Teks (www.webteks.com).
5. Take a hard look at your business and/or business model.  The world is changing around us with incredible speed.  Is your business in an evolutionary dead end?  Is your industry consolidating to the point where the small firms can no longer be generalists but must build their franchise around a narrow niche specialty?  We get so buried in the trees of daily operational details that it is very easy to miss the information that says your corner of the forest is on fire.  
6. Break the cyclicality of your business.  If your business is intrinsically cyclical, start thinking about how you might diversify into areas that either aren't as cyclical or which are counter cyclical to your existing business.
7. When things go non-linear, follow these rules: a) Stay awake.  You are going to have to let go of what you've been doing even though you don't what new things to do. b) Pay attention.  You need to question every assumption, scrutinize everything you're doing. c) Run experiments.  When the old stuff isn't working, you need to run lots of little, cheap experiments to gather the knowledge and information you need to find your new path.  As they say in Italy, rapido, piccolo, economico.  Fast, small and cheap. d) When something starts to work, throw more resources at it to validate that a new model or approach is actually working.  When you are clear you have a new trajectory to follow, institutionalize it, define it, publish it, train your people in it and promote it.