Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 15

A business firm is a human organization, but a particular type whose purpose is to produce and distribute wealth. The production and incentive systems of any business organization attempt to regulate the production and distribution of goods and services. All the people who take part in running a company do so in order to obtain certain goods and services, among other reasons. One should note that in the previous sentence, the words “among other reasons” are included because omitting what these words indicate would mean a reduction of business firms to technical systems.

Not only is this a common error, it lies at the root of much of what is written about business. Indeed, it is not equivalent to say that all the people related to a company (promoters, managers, workers, customers, suppliers, etc.) seek to satisfy economic motives (obtain certain goods or services in exchange for their contribution) and to say that the sole

motive for their involvement is to obtain these goods or services.

It is not even appropriate—in most cases—to say that the sole motive is an economic one. It is probably, though not always, the sole motive for customers and suppliers. It is also often the case with shareholders or those who provide the capital. However, it is virtually never the sole motive in the case of managers, employees and promoters of the business idea. It may in some cases be the dominant (but not the sole) motive, but in many other cases, even this is not so.

The range of reasons why human beings become involved in organizations whose purpose is to create and distribute material goods (i.e. companies) is as broad as the range of reasons that induce them to become involved in any other type of organization. However, a characteristic feature of business organizations is their generality (they affect everyone) and the importance of economic motives (obtaining of goods and services). This is so because the company's very purpose is to produce and distribute material wealth.

The constant presence and importance of this kind of motive in business firms is the reason why one tends, when explaining how they must operate, to omit all the other motives. Thus, theorists of the nature of business firms often use the technical system as a model to represent them.

However, this in itself is not so serious. The problem is that managers of companies make the same mistake, trying to run them like simple technical systems. The reason for this partial blindness is not difficult to explain; at the same time, it shows why this blindness is such a common mistake.

Whenever a manager's actual motivations are dominated by economic considerations, he will tend to manage as if they were the only ones that truly counted. If he were to discover that his personnel had other types of motives, he would address them if by so doing he could save money (he would try to satisfy these motives if he could save what he would have to provide in compensation for their non-satisfaction). It is easy to see that in some companies the basic strategy of many negotiation and participation processes is to manipulate personnel psychologically, trying to “motivate” them as cheaply as possible. In such cases, the company is not conceived of as an organism but as a mere technical system from which points of friction must be eliminated.

A company can be conceived of as a technical system, an organism or an institution, both in the way it is explained and in the way it is run. Company managers do not usually waste time and effort making explicit the models they use to make their decisions. Instead, they confine themselves to making decisions on the basis of the model they have interiorized through their experience (that is, through their own practical view of the company). This model expresses a manager's beliefs and is determined by the quality of his motives for performing his mission. These beliefs are the product of the values targeted and actually achieved in the course of previous decisions. The decisions he makes now enable us to infer what his beliefs about reality are and, consequently, the motives and values that actually govern his decisions.

When we discussed the features of an anthropological model—the organization as an institution—we noted that, whether it makes them explicit or not, every human organization has values. The contents of these values determine both the conception of the person and the conception of the company's mission that its managers attempt to realize through their decisions.

In sum, a manager can approach his work by attempting to achieve three different types of values:

1. A good ratio between what his company produces and what it consumes.

2. A degree of actual satisfaction for the people involved with the company.

3. A contribution to the personal development of the people cooperating with him, in so far as this depends on what the company requires of them or gives them.

When all three types of values are present in the decision-making process, the manager is building an institution. If only the first two are present, he is developing an organism. If his decisions only pursue goals at the first level, what he wants to do is to manage a technical system.

As we have already seen, what the manager pursues with his work will depend on his own motives, since these are what will determine the model he will use—consciously or unconsciously—to make his decisions. The greater risk that the company faces, in comparison with many other human organizations, of being reduced to a technical system, is due to the fact that the nature of its purpose grants a fundamental importance to the first of these values: the economic one.

A company must produce more than it consumes; otherwise it will cease to exist as a company. It would be senseless for the cell charged with creating wealth in the social organism to consume more than it produces. Therefore, a necessary indicator (although not sufficient on its own) of a manager's professional competence is his ability to achieve goals with an economic value.

However, it is not the same thing to recognize companies’ (and managers’) need to achieve economic goals and to say that these goals are the only ones. The latter statement is completely false—as would be the statement that the only goals are those that might be set for the other two types of values.

It cannot even be said that a company's performance improves when the difference between what is produced and consumed increases. One would first have to analyze what sacrifices have been made with respect to the other two values to achieve this result. Nor must one equate the statements that the company must obtain a positive balance between economic value produced and economic value consumed is a necessary condition for operating, and that its most important task is to maximize this difference.

The latter statement would be logically equivalent to saying that the company's only goals are economic ones. The immediate consequence of this mistake is to approach the company as a technical system. When a manager makes his decisions on this basis, his actions necessarily tend to destroy the company's organic and institutional reality, that is, to destroy it as a human organization.

1 Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: The Free Press. 3rd ed. 1976), p.39. See also Simon's comments on this point on pp. xxviii. of the introduction to the third edition.