Part I: basic assumptions about the organizational world and how it works
The global economic processes provide both prospects and challenges to a newly formed organizational system. To be a successful manager, one needs to put a strong emphasis on the global and world-centric context of the organization and take these factors into consideration when implementing new policies and practicing leadership in the affiliated organization. The organizational world has become more complex and nowadays is not limited to rationalization of production and increasing organization’s performance. The constantly growing influence of transnational corporations and their access to vast resources obliges them to be socially responsible in order to co-exist with public sphere, governmental bodies, and NGOs. Therefore, I assume that the main principles of the organization world are sustainable development, networking, mutually beneficial collaboration, and trust. Sustainable development is aimed at long-term prospects that can be beneficial for the whole humanity. Organizations, be it public or private, need to show their determination to benefit the global community and contribute to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. This definitely means sacrificing short-term benefits and gains to get a positive image in the organizational environment.
Networking should be another indicator of the organization’s successful performance. Even though every region has its own peculiarities and local differences, it is networking that enhances the organizations’ potential on the global market by ensuring even resource distribution, effective control mechanisms, and gaining important business contacts. Collaboration is a broad term that encompasses all possible practices that include group decision-making. A shift toward more horizontal organizational system requires managers delegate more and more responsibilities to teams and actually count with their points of view. Collaboration turned out to be an effective mechanism of ensuring that all interests and ideas were taken into consideration, different departments have the same vision of the organization’s mission, and the organization’s resources are not limited to separate resources of each department. The synergy of available resources makes an important characteristic of organizational world. Finally, I consider trust to be an effective tool widely used in the organizational world since it ensures better relationships between all actors and enhances their understanding of global problems and objectives. Trust defines relationships between managers and employees, organizations and clients, etc., and helps to establish long-lasting empowered relations between these groups. To sum all the concepts up and to reflect upon my vision of the organizational world, I assume that most organizational processes are globally defined and require strong interrelation between organizations, employees, managers, public sector, and government in creating the same vision of the situation. Such definition may seem vague, therefore, I would like to bring two examples up and relate them to my vision of the situation.
It is not a secret that organization’s success pretty much depends on the management’s ability to change the worldview and adapt to new conditions on the market. Failing to comply with global market’s requirements and customers’ expectations leads to organization’s downfall. Of my favorite examples of organization’s failure to adapt to a rapidly changing market is a competition between Walmart and Kmart. Even though Kmart did financially well in 1960-1972 (Madden 334), it failed to compete with rapidly growing Walmart due to a simple reason – Kmart refused to accept global market trends and considered its previous success the key to future success (Madden 335). Not only did Kmart choose the wrong strategy to cover the high fixed costs by locating its stores in big cities, but also it failed to understand the very definition of store as network, considering store to be stand-alone operation (Madden 335). On the contrary, Walmart created a network of stores that could also satisfy the Americans living in small towns (Madden 335). My father’s friend recalls how difficult it was for him, living in a town, to travel 50 miles to the nearest Kmart to do shopping, whereas with the emergence of Walmart in his town he simply stopped visiting Kmart. If I were a Kmart CEO, I would have considered Walmart’s approach, customers’ needs, and expanded Kmart to small towns and rural area to create an effective network and gain the population’s trust and new loyal customers. Although some stores would not be profitable, such network could have competed with that of Walmart at a similar rate of success.
The second example is related to my perception of collaboration in the organizational world. I am strongly convinced that a good manager needs to empower his/her employees to make important decisions during the working process. By doing this, a manager will get a strong support for his promotion, access to pool of new ideas, and decrease his/her own workload. My friend working as a restaurant manager faced the problem of being overloaded with his employees’ queries of how to do this or that, and he was forced to spend his time on fixing the problems rather than managing the restaurant. After he asked me what might be the problem I advised him to gather an employee meeting and explain how they can deal with problems themselves. The result was quite obvious to me: the employees were delighted with the opportunity not bother management, whereas my friend improved his manager’s performance significantly and got promoted to the restaurant director. Although this situation may seem not applicable to organizational world, I strongly believe that collaboration approach, offered by me, finds its roots on the global level, and can easily be implemented in particular situations with regards to their specificities.
Part II: basic assumptions about human nature and people.
The question about human nature has always been debatable on different levels of discussion. Some people think that human nature is determined by biological factors, whereas the other consider people to be purely economical creatures. My previous reflection upon organizational world pretty much defines my perception of a human nature. There are several criteria I would like to distinguish and review to synthesize my own view of the issue. Undoubtedly, human nature is defined by the biological factors. The development of the humanity was characterized by biological selection of the fittest, when people were helpless before natural phenomena and wild animals. Later on, people learned to live in communities, which required them to divide labor between their members, have common social activities, etc. With the emergence of nation-states and big cities people trusted their security problems to the government, whereas the social and economical factors came to the forefront. With globalization processes taking place throughout the world, the human nature was mainly influenced by the global economic factors. Globalization brought a sort of standardization of human needs, differently in different countries, of course, and most people can now be seen as clients searching to satisfy the variety of their needs, including economic, spiritual, and developmental.
Multinational corporations, NGOs, and governmental bodies became the main suppliers of the aforementioned goods. In addition, modern globalized economy requires people to improve their skills constantly (i.e. lifelong education) and strive for societal appraisal in order not to be excluded from rapidly changing society. Therefore, I assume that modern people’s nature is a unique mixture of consumer and learner’s desires and a desire to match the societal standards. To make it short, the human nature is a constant struggle to satisfy the desires, no matter how different they may be. Management and marketing principles are easily applied to such concept of human nature and allow satisfying human desires more effectively. At this point, I disagree with Neal Emerald’s claim that consumerism is totally spiritually destructive (24-25). One simply needs to accept it as inevitable part of every person’s life and acknowledge that consumerism, or desire to consume, finds its way out in many forms.
The second example is just witnesses how marketing and management can satisfy, I would even say manipulate, human basic needs. After having a workout I entered a grocery market to get a drink, and although I just needed a small bottle of water, I ended up buying a gum and an energy bar. This example demonstrates how people can easily follow the basic marketing tricks and take them as granted. Although both examples are quite different, they clearly show human desire to follow popular societal trends in satisfying their needs.
Works Cited
Emerald, Neal D. "Consumerism, Nature, and the Human Spirit." Virginia Tech Digital Library and Archives. N.p., 2 Nov. 2004. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-12272004-133514/unrestricted/capstonefinal11-29-04.pdf>.
Madden, Bartley J. "MANAGEMENT’S WORLDVIEW: FOUR CRITICAL POINTS ABOUT REALITY, LANGUAGE, AND KNOWLEDGE BUILDING TO IMPROVE ORGANIZATION PERFORMANCE." Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce 22 (2012): 334–346. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
