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An organization (also organisation in many Commonwealth countries) is a formal group of people with one or more shared goals. This topic is a broad one.
According to management science, most human organizations fall roughly into five types:
A hierarchy exemplifies an arrangement with a leader who leads leaders. This is the classic bureaucracy. Usually one "rises" by seniority, or by acquiring authority over more people.
Pyramids are an effective way to achieve repeatable results because they have the shortest path from the standard-setter to the worker.They suffer from communication and supervisory faults because the organization is only as good as its weakest link. They lack creativity because they have poor communications ("why" is often lost).
The classic fix for the communication problem is a magazine that reviews the whole hierarchy's business, perhaps daily or weekly. One good scheme has each person send e-mail up each week, telling what he did, his plans, and problems. Each boss makes a summary and sends it up. Then all the bosses send their summary down, appended to the summary from their boss.
At Printronix this freed cash equal to a year's revenue, sped up engineering cycles six fold, reduced defects by two sigmas (see varianceThis article is about mathematics. Alternate meaning: variance (land use). In probability theory and statistics, the variance of a random variable is a measure of its statistical dispersion, indicating how far from the expected value its values typically), increased inventory turns tenfold and doubled product service life. People found out what to fix, and where.
Hierarchies were satirisedSatire is a literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject (individuals, organizations, states) often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. In Celtic societies, it was thought a bard's satire could have phys in The Peter PrincipleThe Peter Principle is a theory originated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter which states that employees within a hierarchical organization advance to their highest level of competence, are then promoted to a level where they are incompetent, and then stay in that ( 1969For other uses, see Number 1969. For the movie, see 1969 (movie). Events January January 1 Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch purchases the largest selling British Sunday newspaper The News Of The World January 5 The Derry Riots leave over 100 people i), a book that introduced the term hierarchiology and the saying that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence".
An extremely rigid, in terms of responsibilities, type of organization is exemplified by FührerprinzipFuhrerprinzip was the German name for leader principle a system with a hierarchy of leaders that resembled a military structure. It was applied to civil society at large in Nazi Germany. Philosophy The philosophy of this system is that each organisation i.