Though Ajit Balakrishnan has correctly highlighted the shift in workflow management from the industrial era to the digital enterprise of today (“Away with the org chart”, July 14), I firmly believe that the “Org Chart” (or its future avatar) is here to stay for two reasons.
First, though we’ve evolved tremendously over the past many centuries, humans have an innate desire to be led. A “traditional org structure” designates one leader at every level who is responsible for those under him and who ultimately has to “pull the trigger” on the decisions that he is paid to take. In the absence of this, corporate entities would evolve into play-schools for toddlers.
What I do agree with, however, is the change in the way leaders rally their troops and reach out to anyone irrespective of their hierarchy and the use of tools such as the iPad and Salesforce.com’s Chatter service that serve as organisational enablers.
Second, I think successful organisations of the future would be ones that find a balance between creativity and ideas on one hand, and good-old “getting stuff done” on the other. As is often said, an organisation is a vehicle that successfully achieves what the government and the social sector cannot do. So, even as one encourages non-hierarchical ideation, an organisation is deemed successful only when it channels those ideas correctly and “gets the wheels rolling”. In reality, this happens only when there is a proper structure in place (often called command-and-control).
Sudeep Aditya, Bangalore
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