The birth of new approaches to entrepreneurial behavior

There is always a course or book that stays with us forever after we graduate from college. For me, it has always been “Organizational Behavior” by Steven L. McShane. An avid fan of ethics and philosophy, this was a book I read for my only business course during my college years, and in it, all the theories and notions I learned from my art classes were put into practice in a single book. Text book. – all applicable to the laws of business.

Years later, I worked for a marketing company with the worst organizational culture; or as my book defines it: the basic pattern of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that are considered the correct way to think about and act on the problems and opportunities facing an organization. If an organization is groups of people working interdependently toward a purpose, my first experience in a marketing company represented everything that is wrong with organizational culture. It was, in fact, a deteriorating culture, with holes looming at every turn, primarily due to a lack of sound business planning, an encouraging support structure, and the desire to make money before understanding the right way to do it.

You see, as my book explains, the evolution of creating successful work environments is not a new curiosity. In fact, it goes back to Plato and the human desire to achieve personal and collective goals: another of my favorites, Stephen R. Covey, speaks in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Creating mission statements and ultimate goals helps individuals and organizations chart clear paths to guide them toward achieving whatever they set out to accomplish.

I am writing this article in an effort to review the nature of behavior and organizational structure as it applies to today’s online marketing industry. For those in the online marketing world, the discussion of productivity and its relationship to time is probably a topic you’ve come across before. We’ve all heard and read Timothy Ferris’s bestseller “The Four-Hour Workweek.” He may have also found the great collection of courses, podcasts, and videos on the nature of productivity; one that comes to mind right now is Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productivity. Famous blogger and “Blog Profits Blueprint” author Yaro Starak also teaches “The Real Secret of a 2-Hour Workday.” What I intend to do here is dig into why the productivity/time ratio is a constant topic among academics and researchers, and why many successful online marketing enthusiasts are fascinated with working smart instead of working hard.

And so I begin.

It all starts with… individual personalities and value systems

Experts and researchers who have attempted to catalog and assess the nature of personality are responsible for mastering theories such as the “Big Five Dimensions of Personality” and the Myers-Briggs type indicator. These are two that you are probably already familiar with. How personality relates to different value systems is another fascinating topic for people. Values, as my book defines them, are stable evaluative beliefs that guide our preferences for outcomes or courses of action in a variety of situations. So when you combine personality with values, it becomes clearer to understand why the human makeup is so different and why it makes us all so unique. The things we value such as security, power, hedonism, universalism, tradition, achievement, exist in each of us in different proportions. The question that arises is how is it possible to reconcile the idea that in an organization we are supposed to unite to achieve a common goal, when we are individually so different?

Organizational structure, in my textbook, refers to the “division of labor as well as the patterns of coordination, communication, workflow, and formal power that direct organizational activities.” Or as Stephen Covey explains in detail in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, how the levels of dependency, independence and interdependence between people in an organization work and, even more, how a company can achieve organizational success when people they are all so different, all with their unique sets of personality and values.

There are two elements of organizational structure that you are already quite familiar with: the centralized organization and the decentralized organization. I would like to focus on decentralization because it is becoming clear that the online marketing industry is becoming more and more decentralized as company structures are flattened and bureaucracy is removed with changes like open concept office spaces. . My previous good book, Organizational Behavior, defines decentralization as the means of dispersing authority and decision-making power throughout the organization, eliminating micromanagement and allowing people the freedom to set their own work ethics and strategies, all according to their own personal system and values.

How do I know that the organizational structure is decentralizing?

Write a job description, such as web developer or graphic designer, on craig’slist and see how many companies have posted freelance jobs and outsourcing alternatives. Freelance work, whether for design or SEO, is becoming the most prominent way corporations assign work. Today’s business owners are even catching on to the trend of outsourcing administrative work to virtual secretaries.

Take Google, for example. I invite you to watch this video to see what is really going on within the organizational structure of Google. Basically, Google is giving its employees the freedom to attend to their basic needs, their own domestic needs, and their personal wants at work, all in an effort to be more productive at work. I’m not advocating that organizations should start thinking about bringing gourmet chefs into their cafeterias, but I am saying that Google is finding a way to let workers own their own productivity. In turn, Google is considered to be one of the best places to work for http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/index.html, and I confidently say one of the most innovative. and advanced companies of today.

Now, you can say that when a company is a young company without years of experience, it is important to closely monitor everyone’s work and allow bureaucracy to reign supreme as an element and catalyst for “true” productivity, aka a workday. from 9-5. You can also say that productivity speeds up with experience. These are elements that I am in no way ignoring: there are absolute truths in both factors.

However, I am talking about breaking out of the rigid values ​​of our Western society that dictate that “time is money”, and working a 12-hour workday is what will make you reap the rewards of “real” success – AKA financial success. Another philosophy you’ve probably heard of is that constant movement is the path to true happiness (closely related to ideas like “The Secret”). But if you look at success stories, like that of Yaro Starak, you will see that he speaks exactly of bringing elements of balance and the desire for well-being as priorities that overcome the hunger for money.

I am by no means advocating giving up worldly needs, but I am trying to incorporate into the strategy the need for well-being and inner fulfillment which is a factor not reflected in the 9-5 turn, and the one time 2-week of vacation once a year.

So why is everyone in the online marketing industry interested in reducing the workweek? Why is it that everyone is trying to find other means of productivity?

Those who see great success in this industry have the freedom to travel the world and work from their laptops from whatever country they are in and whatever beach they happen to be on. Pursuing a lifestyle like this is not unique to the online marketing industry, but with the advent of web technologies, this is increasingly becoming a reality for others in different industries.

The organizational structure must allow employees to experience the lifestyle they see themselves living (while, of course, being productive and contributing to your organization). While personality and values ​​are different from person to person, our desire to live our lives without restriction is probably a universal desire.

Organizational culture must change to create employees who work smart, not hard. Producing profit is the ultimate goal of any organization, and the validity of this need will never be disputed, but the realization that producing happy employees (like Google employees) and the freedom to work in the environment best suited to our individual preferences is something we see prevailing as online marketing companies see more value in outsourcing. The importance of pursuing happiness and well-being is a complex goal in itself, but by understanding more about what employees need and giving them the freedom to meet those needs, we may be moving toward a more successful formula for culture and the organizational structure.

In closing, I’ll mention another term that my textbook explores: organizational commitment. What this term refers to is the emotional attachment, identification, and involvement of the employee in a particular organization. Organizational behavior scholars call this effective engagement because it refers to the individual’s feelings toward the organization. Perhaps the goal of companies should shift from producing hard workers to developing employees who derive satisfaction from working where they do. Happy employees are productive employees, and if flexibility is the answer, then organizational structures that move toward the freedom to work productively under sets of principles that one dictates for oneself is something to rejoice in and capture momentum.

Anne @ Toronto

Also known as happily productive

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