管理中的树状结构 结构, 管理

yoyo530521

Nature: tree structure in management

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator(n.食肉动物，掠夺者) like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives(v.兴旺，繁荣) in groups of a certain size. A herd(n.兽群) of impalas（黑斑羚） might have 100 adults; baboons(狒狒) maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy(adj.笨拙的，难处理的).

Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate(v.协调) these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly(adv.明白地). In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups, which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals.

In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it.

      我去年曾去非洲，在野外看到了一些以前只在动物园见过的动物。狮子尤给我印象深。自然中生存的狮子看起来比笼里的活跃十倍，简直不像一个物种。我想正如大范围活动的食肉动物狮子生活在野外会感觉好些一样，人类独自工作也会好一些。动物园的生活会安逸不少，但不是为他们所设的生活。
      在野外，动物群只有维持特定规模才能生生不息。一群黑斑羚一般有100只成年羚，狒狒群的个体数目在20左右，而狮子区区10只就成群。人也是团队动物。从有关原始狩猎社会的资料，团体研究以及我个人的经验来看，结论都一致，可大致推断理想的团队规模为，8人为佳，20人就很难管理，50人则难以控制。
      公司很清楚机构庞大难运作，所以在内部划分部门。可是为了协调彼此分工，就引入新概念：顶头上司。
      大公司对各部门实行树型结构管理。你的顶头上司就是你们组和大树的联结点。不过在人们用这种方法划分大机构时，会发生很奇怪的事，以前还没人明确指出过。经理是你的上司，他代表整组。一个由10个经理组成的团队和单纯10个人在一起工作的团队不一样，它是一个组中阻的团队。这意味着10个经理组成的团队工作起来犹如10个单独个体在工作一样。
      在实际操作中，一组人不可能表现得像一个人。在如此这般划分组别的大公司里，就会有压力。每一组都努力工作，看起来像是为人而设的个人团体。这也是划分小组的目的所在。

huafengwei

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