Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [137]
A job, especially when frozen in place on an organizational chart, takes on a life of its own. It’s possible that, at the moment it is created, a job fills a vital business need. But those needs change over time, while the jobs and the org charts change much more slowly. Gore’s concept of commitments is designed to mimic the way the company’s actual needs evolve: Associates don’t get reassigned all at once from one unit to another, or moved up and down in a periodic purging and reorganization. Instead, they migrate, moving from one commitment to another as their time allows and their interests dictate. This begins on a new hire’s first day. When she asks, “Where is my job?” the answer she gets is, “Figure it out.”
This organic system allows people to grow and direct their own work lives in a much more natural way than the typical agony of waiting for a promotion and worrying about getting passed up, with all the office stress that attends such moments. The feelings of many employees placed in that position are summed up in a bit of office black humor—or wisdom: “Where there is death there is hope.” Those moments are stressful, of course, because they are largely outside our own control. But they are also stressful because they are so artificial—you might work for years to prove yourself in a job, trying to build up the case for you to get the next big promotion, only to face the equivalent of a coin flip by your boss that determines whether you receive the recognition you’ve sought.14 Of course, in reality, the question of whether you have contributed effectively to your company’s performance over those years is not an arbitrary one. But those rigid, rectangular “boxes and lines”—to use Rich Teerlink’s mocking expression—of the organizational chart have a way of making us feel like it is.
Even as the boxes confine the people within them, they lock down the organization itself, too. Those periodic mass reorganizations that all companies undergo are the proof of it: Every couple of years, several units will be merged while others are broken up; this vice president will be relieved of some responsibilities while that one is given new ones. All the boxes below them are shifted around accordingly. The accompanying press release always includes a quote from top management about the necessity of realignment in “a changing marketplace.” There is nothing new about this ritual. In Up the Organization, Robert Townsend quotes noted first-century Roman satirist and writer Petronius Arbiter: “We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”15
Bob Koski described organizational charts, a little hyperbolically, as “casting in stone something that’s going to change.” It’s not exactly stone, because these charts are frequently torn up and revised. But they are certainly static, while a world-class business—like the world itself—is not. That’s why Townsend warned against printing and circulating organizational charts: They suggest that the higher-ups know more than they do. “It would not hurt to assume, in short,” Townsend wrote for Playboy in 1970, “that every man—and woman—is a human being, not a rectangle.”16 And you never know when your company’s fate may lie in the hands of a night janitor who answers the phone when she ought, really, to be mopping the floor.
Because of this adaptability, Gore’s lack of formal organizational structure is not, as one might suppose, a hindrance to sustainability. Gore’s fifty-year history testifies to that. As Koski argued, great companies are constantly reinventing themselves anyway, so at best an organizational chart provides an illusion of stability over time, while modifying it offers—as Petronius wrote—an illusion of progress. An organization that employees adapt on the fly—like butterflies reacting to a sudden wind gust—is less likely to build up, over time, anachronistic little fiefs that no