Dumb habits in organizational structure

Am I speaking something that is absolutely out of mind? Without paying any regards to what our whole organizational structure is all about, when we talk about organizational structure or organizational behavior, a bigger picture eludes us paving a way for a larger organized society where in each individual’s processes, their functions, their goals are decided by the management so how can that be, by anyways called as the Dumb Habits? It might not be a willful effort in doing some dumb stuff in an organization, our managers are so trained to act dumb and take unnecessary decisions by spending thousands of dollar where its not really needed. There have been lots of practical disasters which have had happened in the past which went on to create histories not for doing something great, but a lesson to be learnt from the disastrous mistakes even highly trained individuals make when in power.

Organizational bigger management system has the power to make smart people do dumb and stupid things for which they feel really proud of. The people working in organizations become way too moralistic of their values in the sense, that they follow their superior’s misguided orders for the benefit of some reward in return. The work culture and system of an organization determines how an individual behaves and works for achieving his common goals and so they blindly follow the guidelines given without having any urge to argue if they feel something is going wrong and as a result the whole organization suffers. Some of the decisions taken are wisely supervised but play havoc when executed. There is one particular episode I am particularly reminded of, I read somewhere some months back: it was the research done by Sally Baron, as to why U.S. defense department is spending billions of dollars in creating custom technologies when other similar types of products works the same and that too for a lesser money. The demand for, off the shelf products is not less nor the products are new to the markets, it was in the year 1949, when the president Truman’s Advisory board urged the air force authorities to make use of commercial products, the U.S secretary of defense – William Perry was an adamant supporter of innovative new technologies available and so urged that custom hardware and software systems made sense especially because of the computer revolution happening all over the world and so they still went on to spend billions of dollars where the off the shelf solutions were regarded as inferior.

Since that time, there has been lots of wastage of money on custom technologies; Baron uncovered the cases in which off the shelf products were really beneficial and economically viable. This is a case of real stupidity, how can the officials waste so much of tax payer’s money, is there some fault in the system? Often we see organizations doing utterly stupid things, which wastes lots of their own money and fail to use money in the processes where it’s really necessary. Some people with authority are just habituated to spend money and get expensive items which could have been well balanced with the products costing even less amount. I get so aggressive and angry when I read about such disastrous, unauthorized, unregulated usage of public money but after all Pentagon is much like any other organizations and it is working for the benefit of its citizens in the country, so somewhere it goes on to satisfy our hearts that the use of money was for own benefit, but there could have been a better usage of money.

The people working in the organizations at higher managerial levels needs to understand the actual needs of the people working in an organization and not just spend money, only because the organization is capable of spending that amount of money. It’s only when these people understand how to spend money that the reward systems change, that the dysfunctions happening over the place will vanish.