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ORGANIZATIONAL ALTERNATIVES 363

Many of these are from what I call the Timex School, addressing what makes
people tick (and how to make them tick better). Many address issues regarding
the design of the organization (theoretically to promote better support by people
of the organization’s mission). Many of them treat people as chattel, as if the only
thing of importance is the organization’s mission (which is usually to increase the
return to the stockholder). Essentially, these writings fall into one of three stages
of behavioral discovery.

• Production Efficiency: Getting the most out of people while having little re-
gard for the people themselves.

• Human Behavior: Motivation, needs, and the nature of man.
• Leadership: How to use what we know about people to lead them to greater

productivity and happiness through individual performance and initiative.

In addition to the treatise on individual behavior, we are exposed to arguments
about centralization vs. decentralization. (Have you ever noticed that if a consul-
tant is called in to look at a centralized organization, he will recommend decen-
tralizing? But if called in to look at a decentralized organization, he will
recommend centralization.) We get discourses and criticism of the bureaucratic
form of organization, and discussion on exploitative authoritarian leadership, vs.
benevolent authoritarian leadership, vs. consultative, vs. participative. We divide
aspects of the workplace into motivators and satisfiers. We have advocates of the
bureaucracy, challenged by advocates of adhocracies, questioned by advocates of
teamocracy. And all the time, I get the feeling that we are looking at laboratory
rats, rather than human individuals.

Choosing among Organizational Alternatives

“A time for everything under heaven” (Ecclesiastes)

My library is replete with eloquent, supportable arguments for every organiza-
tional style under the sun. We have the classic bureaucracy, which has been de-
scribed as both implicitly efficient and patently inefficient. Within bureaucracies,
we have exploitative leadership styles, as well as benevolent, consultative, and
participative. We have adhocracies, with a shift in power and purpose. The adhoc-
racy style has been supported by such recognized experts as Warren Bennis, Alvin
Toffler, Henry Mintzberg, Robert Graham, and Robert Waterman. It has been
adopted to allow individuals and groups to operate more freely across the tradi-
tional organizational boundaries. It has created new conditions for power and
communication. It has led to the Teamocracy organization style.