Had my first day of class today. What an unusual experience to be sitting in class again after a long hiatus. The title of the class is “Design in Management” and the structure and content (from a glance at the syllabus) is similar to the DMOC class at CMU. Parts of the class include “The Art of Management” and, of course, “The Nature of Design.”
The question I want to address in today’s post is personal and it’s an exercise to see how relevant the idea of organizations is. How much do organizations impact my life? It stems from something that was addressed in passing during today’s class (that all of those in the room could probably jot down and discuss at least 10 orgs in our lives) along with this article I came across the other day. Drucker called management “the most important innovation of the 20th century,” and I am certainly – to an extent – a product of the 20th century. So the question – what are 10 organizations that are relevant to me?
- Institution of family (wife, mama, papa, brother, in-laws)
- Local church (also an institution and probably better described as an organism rather than an organization), other churches from my past, other Christians
- My friends
- My physical environment (the greater Cleveland area, Ohio)
- My country & trans-national country (Korean America/Korean diaspora, America, political association)
- My education (various universities)
- My work (Marriott International, past jobs and professional networks)
- My life brands (Apple, Whole Foods, JCrew, PNCBank, Coca-Cola Company, Moleskin, etc)
- My digital environment (Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc)
- My interests & hobbies (music, design, food, etc)
What’s striking is that one could easily write a college essay saying that the accumulation of these 10 organizations makes up what is called my identity. However, I’d like to think that my identity transcends the wrapping of these organizations. I’ve also noticed that the resulting list is different from what I intended to do – I thought the exercise would yield the top 10 brands in my life but it ended up as a list of major groupings rather than individual brands. I suppose this framework reflects the way I want to view organizations since individual brands are constantly changing in my life. This makes this list more stable (i.e. individual friends may change but friends as a group will always be a vital organization). I also wonder why I separated the digital from the “real” physical environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two categories merged in the years ahead.
Comments
I’m not sure I understand your use of the term “organization” to refer to something like your friends or family. I would view those more as communities. I’d be interested to hear whether you find it useful to differentiate between those two terms.
I’m looking forward to following along with your studies. Say hi to Buchanan for me, and good luck — very exciting.
Hi Simon. Yeah, I tried to write the first thing that came to mind but had the same reflection – that these aren’t really accepted as common understanding of organization. I think they made it to the list as I started to get more personal and extended my common understanding of the word to anything outside of myself (because one could argue that something plus an individual = collective/community/organization) for we live in a world that struggles with the boundaries between self and beyond self. You’re right, I”m taking “organization” to mean communities relevant to my personal life sphere(s). I, too, am curious if this differentiation ends up being useful. I want to push the limits of my personal understanding of the concept – maybe it’ll end up being as generic as H. Simon’s definition of design; which some people find helpful and others think it’s not because his def seems to encompass a big chunk of human activity.
At the surface level, if you know my wife’s family, they really ARE an organization (there’s a LOT of them in the state of Maryland). Plus, being Asian, my grandparents have always tried to teach me that the Lee family (dynasty) has a long history and seem to make a big deal of our lineage and family tree. And regarding friends as organizations, this chunk seems to overlap a lot with my education – I think a bulk of my friends are closely tied with where I’ve been to school and Facebook knows this all too well
I also organize my friends this way on AIM.
Any thoughts of getting a Ph.D.?
and another thought …
I think I’m also interested in family/friends as an organization because we’ve all seen heroes of the corporate world fall because of their lack of organizing their personal lives. We pretty much see CEOs and leaders of various organizations resign or go to jail due to some mishap in their personal (family a lot of times) lives. The Greeks were also intrigued by this as we clearly see Oedipus’ life fall apart as a king (leader of an org) because of his family organization issues. I have a hunch that there’s a link between family and public orgs.
Interesting thought, thanks for the reflection. I’m not considering the phd path right now, but I’m intrigued by the possibility. I’ll be sure to keep up with you here to get a better sense of what it’s like.