Management Basics - Mind Your Own Business

By Hans Bool

If people would mind their own business life would be boring. But it would help organization if employees would mind their own business. The easiest way to manage an organization is by picturing it as a network, hierarchy or other form of small atomic business units; a single employee business. Think of every person in the organization as a solo entrepreneur.

Organizations become more complex because we have forgotten that they are only a set of companies that work under the same umbrella. It is easier to join an organization so that people know each other and they can interact swiftly amongst themselves.

Yet organizations have grown over the last decades and have become more and more complex and some simple basics about management and control have been replaced by all kinds of techniques, methods and inspirational issues that have little to do with the main drive of organizations: to do business.

If you know what your business is, what you are good at, the productive role that fits you best, you will also fit easier in the organization. If everybody's role is clear, than teamwork will follow automatically.

But as organizations become more complex, the attention for ones' personal role seems to become less of a point for management. One could wonder whether we need all that expensive management if people would just know what their own business is. Or, does the manager make it all too complex just to save his job? I don't think that way, but sometimes it looks like it.

Productivity of the organization can only start by employees being productive. And to know how to be productive, try to imagine yourself as being a single company, within the boundaries of a larger organization.