Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 76

Another critical structural dilemma is how to hold an organization together without holding it back. If structure is too loose, people go astray, with little sense of what others are doing. But rigid structures stifle flexibility and encourage people to waste time trying to bolster or beat the system.

We can see some of the perils of a loose structure in the former accounting firm Andersen Worldwide, indicted in 2002 for its role in the Enron scandal. Efforts to shred documents and alter memos at Andersen's Houston office went well beyond questionable accounting procedures. At its Chicago headquarters, Andersen had an internal audit team, the Professional Standards Group, charged with reviewing the work of regional offices. Unlike other large accounting firms, Andersen let frontline partners closest to the clients overrule the internal audit team. This fostered local discretion that was a selling point to customers, including Enron, but came back to haunt the firm. As a result of the lax controls, “the rainmakers were given the power to overrule the accounting nerds” (McNamee and Borrus, 2002, p. 33). The august firm collapsed as a result.

The opposite problem is common in managed health care. Insurance companies give clerks far from the patient's bedside the authority to approve or deny treatment or to review medical decisions, often frustrating physicians and patients. Doctors lament spending time talking to insurance representatives that would be better spent seeing patients. Insurance providers sometimes deny treatments that physicians see as urgent. In one case, a hospital‐based psychologist diagnosed an adolescent as likely to commit sexual assault. The insurer questioned the diagnosis and denied hospitalization. The next day, the teenager raped a 5‐year‐old girl.