About Interests, Conflicts and Power

I am reading a book by Garteh Morgan called “Images of Organization” – the central idea behind this book is that we view organization from various views/metaphors, such as burocratic organization, organization as living organism and etc. And I especially liked this statement about rules in organization when viewing it from Organization as Political System metaphor: “… What is the real significance of the rules? Although their formal purpose may be to protect employees, customers, or the public at large, they alo are there to protect their creators…”. How often we observe the situation when some accident has occurred and a special commission, assigned to investigate this accident, makes conclusion that it happened because of broken rules. But, the point is, “… that broken rules that accompany that accident have often been broken thousands of times before as part of normal work practice, since normal work is IMPOSSIBLE without breaking the rules..”. Morgan is damn true, we may successfully manage projects without all those GPs and SPs of CMMI, but if we fail the project – audit team is the first to tell us that this happened because rules were broken…

I really recommend everyone to ready Morgan’s book!