Managermind

In previous post i was falling in philosophy about dynamic aware organisation. In this article a will cover one aspect of real life organisation in companies that prevents them to be dynamic aware and therefore not to have desired advantages in the competition.

I’ talking about Center of Might. I heard about Center of Might (germ. Machtzentrum) several Years ago from Professor Menzel and since that never again. But the conception of Might Center stays in my mind till now maybe because i have seen it in the practise in real life organisations.

Definition

Center of Might is aggregation of competency and bulkheading of some partitions of a company. Traditional or else functional structured organisations divide the whole organisations in such functional partitions of responsibilities but this leads to the establishment of “Might-centers”.

The establishment of such bulkheading between departments grounds on many factors. One of the fundamental things it the understanding of the fact that organisations are nothing else as social structure or network of living people. People tend to have own opinions and different personal interests. One of the well known goals of human is gaining and preserving might. Not considering that in organisation structure leads can lead to such problems.

Nevertheless Traditional Business Study, beginning with Adam Smith don’t covers that point, where people are considered as one of the resources of the company. And the vision of a company dominates the vision of the “well oiled machine“! This vision may work in industrialization age, but fails in modern times. But even today the believe of obedient “machine-worker” dominates the vision of corporate organisation developers.

The other aspect is the complexity, large companies with many departments, organisation units and large hierarchies are often affected by the problems of strong centres of might. This is naturally, cause the management of big companies takes a greater risk by breaking the established and “proved” way. I think that introduction gives provides the understanding of the concept of Center of Might.

Curse of Center of Might

Now we understand the Might-centers, but are they so bad? Yes, the greatest problem in concentration of might on several points inside the same organisation is the personal protectionism, that results from distrust mood between organisations subjects. Therefore one might owner is tended to protect himself. That leads to several problems in organisation:

• Information diffidence
• Even Information falsification
• Resistance for changes/improvements
• Pessimistic Forecasting
• De-motivation

These points are leading to inefficiency of the whole company. The discussion of the problems can be continued and sophisticated, but not intendet here, but can be proceed in as comments …