Interpreter of dreams

It is an amazing opportunity to look at organizations and structures. It is amazing to notice a stark similarity with historical accounts of empires and princely expedition. In a series of lectures delivered between 1915-1916 at the University of Vienna, Sigmund Freud mentioned the historical importance of dream interpreters. He went to the extent of narrating an episode from Alexander, The Great’s expedition to conquer the world, when the emperor contemplated backing off from a long siege of Tyre. It is then when Alexander dreams of victory. The emperor quickly summons his dream interpreters who guide the emperor to continue with the siege for victory will sure be on his side. The story is surely very fascinating and bears strong resemblance to our organization today. In the consumer packaged good world where Marketing is considered and treated as a line management function the world revolves around the Marketer and eventually the General Manager.

All functions support the GM in his or her tasks. In today’s day and age of effectiveness, efficiency and performance measurement the two arms of the GM are finance and marketing research. In his book the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about an episode at EMC when they were able to understand and relate the prospective organization structure pure based on look at the architecture of the motherboard of a DEC computer. More recent the NY Times example mapping of emails at Enron let to an insightful discovery. Emails exchanged between various people in the organization to isolate and identify the most important and potentially the most influential member of the organization. In turn detect anomalies where people had duplicate emails addresses to work around the system.

Structures are interesting and so are the patterns they bear resemblances to. Technology has only helped to blur some of the boundaries between their specific deliverables but for the most part that continue to be the dream interpreters to the leaders as they analyze the past and recommend future course.