Dysfunctional/ Functional Organizations: Success and Failure

There are three important works which might form the nidus of a good course to offer college seniors as they find themselves on the launching pad into the real world, out of the academy and into the fire, as it were.

It might help some of us, who are already here to understand we are not alone and the difficulties of dealing with bosses and coworkers has always been with us and likely always will be. 

Of course, all of this is from the American perspective.  The Phantom suspects other societies, in particular the Germans, and maybe now, the Chinese, have been better at 
organizing people into highly efficient and functional groups.  The German Wehrmacht, the army of the Third Reich, was able to roll over the Russians, the British, the French, and all the lesser military powers with superior efficiency, planning, technology and imagination.  Ultimately, the industrial capacity of the United States and the sheer weight of the Soviet leviathan and Russia's withering winter was too much to overcome.

As longtime readers of this blog will know, the Phantom considers the best portrait of a dystopia, a dysfunction society and dysfunctional organizations is The Wire. Virtually everything you see in your own job, company, organization that can go wrong, does go wrong in The Wire. The image of the police detective sergeant who nails a plywood siding back on the door of a townhouse which contains murder victims because he does not want to find those bodies listed on his white board at the office--they would wreck his statistics of unsolved murders--is so classic for the mindset of the organization man.  

The Band of Brothers provides a detailed picture of an organization which actually does function successfully--the American Army actually does push forward and defeat the German Army--but it does this despite the stupidity of its leadership. It is the non coms and the enlisted men who suffer the consequences of asinine decisions by officers and top leadership, but somehow, the Allied advance overwhelms the German Army, which is smarter and better at just about everything, but simply cannot deal with the overwhelming numbers the Americans are throwing at it. In the process, you can see the great sense of purpose and resolve individuals derive from the magnificent victory they've achieved, a victory which no individual could ever have achieved, a victory which occurred because of group effort.

And then there is Enough Glory for All , an obscure CBC docudrama about the efforts of Sir Frederick Banting and Sir Charles Best in 1921, at the University of Toronto, to discover the cause of juvenile diabetes, to identify the missing agent, insulin, and to develop that agent into a usable treatment, saving the lives of millions through the year. This, too, took the talents, the specialized knowledge of many people, working together, but the efforts were not connected into good teamwork and they almost crashed into defeat because of a lack of vision and good management. 

Looking at these three worlds side by side reveals much about where each of us finds himself in today's America--on the cusp of changes which could change the world, or mired in a culture which is composed of groups of people who  care nothing for anyone but themselves (e.g., the Barksdale drug gang) but who strive only to maximize gain for themselves.  For those of us who are employed by a company or organization which is designed to accomplish something but we see people we work with or who are above us in the pecking order thwarting the accomplishment of the goal, we can look at these three works and realize we are not alone, thus has it ever been and likely always will be.