Essay On Order And Chaos

Doing Business between Two States: Order & Chaos
Starting from ancient Babylon to todays’ Boston, we can see human created group, team, and community to survive or achieve a common goal. Every group, team, organization or community always strived for order in their eco system. Most of the human activities across the civilization and over the time have been spent to make rules, trying to find pattern, train people to follow discipline to create order. Instead of these cumulative mammoth efforts, it’s very sad to see the end result: there is no full proof success to create order to match uncertainty of external environment.
Same story continues for business scenarios also. For long time CEOs are working hard to tame uncertainties, establishing ultimate order in businesses to ensure future success! But alas most organizations in the process of attaining ultimate order either stopped growing or became a part of the history! Their internal pseudo stability has failed to battle with external business chaos. Very few companies, who succeeded to survive the test of time, are considered to be innovative, doing things out of the box, creating new rules for the game or a game changer itself. Whenever they faced crisis, they defied the order of the system and created something new to survive.

What ‘Order’ Means? Can it help Organizations?
Standardization, Processes, SOPs, rulebooks, policies all are signs of ‘order’ or stability in an organizations. It is indeed favorite for all big companies like Motorola, Dell, Maruti etc. The biggest argument in the favor of ‘order’ is cost reduction, time reduction, confusion reduction. These claims are not wrong. It’s true they help to do all these for short term or in a situation where you don’t need ...

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... order totally?
2. How much chaos is not madness?
The objective of this position paper is to establish, those days are gone when business can claim they are stable. Nobody is stable and cannot be in this dynamic turbulent socio-economic situation. Organizations have to accept this fact and try to find a solution to tackle the problem.
Chaos can beat chaos … this should be the mantra for today’s organizations. But what is really meant by chaos? Is it complete madness to allow people whatever they want to do without particular objective in an organization or can there be any hidden underlying pattern in the making an organization ‘chaotic’? We’ll try to find answers of these questions and in this process we’ll try to reinforce our idea of how chaos can be a part of organization’s strategy to survive and beat uncertainties of harsh reality.

Market Focus & Position: