I live in Rochester, NY, home to the world headquarters of
Kodak and the "real" headquarters of
Xerox (world HQ was here until the execs discovered the benefits of moving it to CT, but the bulk of the US presence is still in Rochester).
It has been interesting to observe these two companies. Kodak is as Republican as you can get. Time was, you had to register Republican to even work there. The place is tight-lipped and super-organized with a very deep hierarcy (even if the org charts look flatter, the ancestral hierarchy is alive and well). If you don't feel comfortable taking a place in that hierarchy as a manager, your career options are quite limited.
Over at Xerox, they're mostly Democrats with a free-wheeling culture that doesn't even include a standard "start" and "stop" time except for shift workers. The hierarchy is as flat as possible and the company encourages "individual contributors" uninterested in moving up the managerial ladder.
These companies teach us is that there's something Democrats need instead of "organization", and that organizing might, in fact, be our Kryptonite. Read on.
(A note on my information sources. I was raised in a Kodak family, worked there during my college summers, had the compay as a client later on for several years, and still maintain close friendships with many Kodak people who tell me as much as Kodak people ever tell anyone. Which is not a lot. I was a Xerox consultant for 18 years, never an employee, and still maintain friendships there as well.)
To begin at the beginning - we have all heard the adage "Lead, follow or get out of the way," which succinctly describes three ways humanity can be categorized: leaders, followers, and disaffected/suspicious outsiders.
Now, we know that people yearn for control and will take all necessary steps to exercise control in whatever way they can over something or someone.
Leaders exercise control in part by articulating unique ideas ("opinion leaders") and in part by giving orders. Followers exercise control by channeling and/or withholding information (managers keeping managerial secrets from staff, staffers peddling water cooler gossip and rumor, etc.). Outsiders exercise control by criticizing the established hierarchy. Many outsiders are actually nascent or reluctant leaders.
Looking at Kodak, we see a structure that comprises leaders and followers. The place is organized to the nth degree. Benefits have always been extremely generous to prevent unionization and the rise of an "outsider" population of critics. A local magazine article published in the 70s, How to tell the Kodak man from the Xerox man, describes Kodakers as punctual, stable, short-haired, complacent, conservative suburbanites - lovers of team sports like bowling and softball who stay in their jobs grinding away until they are "methodical, domesticated old men."
What the article doesn't mention is Kodak's legendary penchant for secrecy (the prime control mechanism in a strong hierarchy of followers). Kodak families commonly do not know what Daddy or Mommy does at work. And stories are rife about Kodak engineers in neighboring labs working on the same subsystem without knowing it.
Kodak is a tight ship. And to Kodakers, across the river at Xerox things are just plain out of control. (To say nothing of the Kodak suspicion that Xerox folks are having a lot more sex.)
After all, the Xerographic process was invented by a Zen Buddhist and applied by a group of bright young things that Kodak people would view as gamblers. (Kodak, by contrast, was founded by a bank clerk.) Xerox's flat hierarchy disdains clockwatching and encourages innovation and criticism. Ask most Xeroids what their job title is and they have no idea because a.) it isn't important and b.) the company is always transforming anyway.
Aggressive balanced workforce standards, set up a long time before they became fashionable, ensure diversity at every level of the company - racial, sexual and gender-orientation diversity - so that all ideas and voices are heard. Xerox also has a great relationship with its unions because it listens to them and is willing to try things like letting factory workers manage themselves. (It works!)
The downside? Well, Xerox is a famous information sieve whose best inventions (the fax, the PC, the GUI, the mouse, the scanner) all ended up making money for other companies but not for Xerox. Being a company of leaders and outsiders, there's a lot of loud debate about the mistakes and (to Kodak eyes) a lot of wheel-spinning, looking for ways to fix the mistakes.
Now, if these two companies remind you of the two major political parties, they should. And if you personally cringe or chafe every time you hear someone yearning for Dems to adopt GOP-style organization... well, you should. Because you, like the Xeroids, are either a leader or an outsider and you will not be happy being told who to vote for as you probably were last year.
So, if organization isn't going to be our "magic bullet", then what is?
Well, at Xerox it's "process". You hear "process" over there until you want to scream, and you hear another term too: "respectful agreements". Xerox runs on agreements made between autonomous workers and kept out of respect, versus military-style orders coming down the chain of command.
Process trumps organization for this reason: process allows a group to stay flexible while accomplishing something. It allows new ideas to be assimilated in an orderly way. Organization makes a group rigid. It makes new ideas hard to assimilate because the group can't restructure quickly enough.
There was a book about Kodak called Teaching the Elephant to Dance. They still haven't. Rumor has it there are significant layoffs in the pipe for later this month. Not that things are rosy at Xerox either but at least they have a major new technology, "smart paper", currently maturing. (Want a newspaper like that one in Early Edition that would change as the news did? It's coming.)
Organization keeps Kodak on a treadmill of incremental innovation. Process lets Xerox burst forward with new technology (after the requisite amount of wheel spinning). A plodding elephant... a kicking ass.
The GOP is composed of leaders and followers because activist GOPs are people with money, property, and education in subjects like business. They like being organized! Anything else threatens stability.
The Dems, on the other hand, comprise leaders and outsiders. Activist Dems are either highly educated in analytical subject areas or they are street-educated cynics. They distrust organization because it will seek to impose things on them. To try to overcome our party DNA is folly. Instead, let's substitute process for organization.
Here's the base process that everything in Xerox runs on - the six-step Problem Solving Process. This is so baked into their culture that I had a terrible time finding a graphic on-line and this one isn't from them, so the typo in it isn't theirs either:
Instead of kvetching about why we aren't organized like the GOP, I wish we would recognize who we are and what our style is and use process.
Is our problem simply that we aren't winning enough elections, or is that just a symptom? What is our problem, and what are some innovative solutions? Let's use the process, try some solutions in the off-year, and then see how well they worked and go around the wheel again in 2006, and 2007, and.... It may be "wheel spinning", but it also works.