Organizational Insight

I've always been fascinated by organizations. I believe that a good organization focuses and multiplies the abilities of its participants; though that can mean the ability screw up massively, it can also mean the ability to do magical, amazing things. I don't have the theoretical underpinnings to understand what makes a good organization work, though I suspect that there are very few absolutes in that regard -- the absolute for one organization is counteracted and counterbalanced by the style of another one, and yet both work. Perhaps it all comes down to What I Learned In Kindergarden.

This morning, reading an article about the McCain and Obama campaigns, I came across this phrase: "It's a disciplined, well-funded campaign against an unfocused, cash-strapped one." For a moment, I had a burst of deja vu, where the first described the Republican campaign and the second, the Democratic one. That's been the tradition. This time out, it isn't working that way, which, regardless of who wins, means that the next Presidential campaign will look very much like the Democratic one, this time. There will be massive Internet presence. Massive use of email, texting, IMs. Electronic meetups, mashups, and mapping. Plus, technologies and methodologies that don't exist now, or are in the prototype stage. The medium may not become the message, but it will certainly be a large part of it.

It brings me back to the idea of bureaucracies. Those much - cursed organizations started as a method of institutionalizing knowledge, allowing the use of relatively unskilled people to produce a repeatable, skilled result. Several years ago, I saw different articles -- one, on the building of Boulder Dam, the other, the design of the SR-71 -- which made the same point - that the key concept in each was the vision and energy of the drivers. They didn't have the sleek, sophisticated technology of today (soon to be the old mode, weary technology of yesterday); instead, they had bright people with a commitment to excellence, and an organizational structure that allowed them to focus that commitment to bring into existence something that none of them could have done alone, something greater than themselves.

I think thats how the next Presidential campaign -- the next successful one -- will work.