Effective Organizations

Please click through to the following link for more resources on creating effective organizations at this website address: http://forestpolicy.typepad.com/am/effective_organizations.html

To be effective long term, human organizations must be based on good principles, focused on appropriate purposes, environmentally fit, and adaptive.

This is no easy challenge, in part because many organizations are legacies of the past, based on bad or out-of-date principles, focused on wrong purposes, and neither environmentally fit nor adaptive.

An effective organization:
•is focused in its mission;
•allows its people to take risks and occasionally fail ("empowerment"'s more important flipside);
•is "flat"; it allows information to flow in both directions, usually through a lack of hierarchy;
•provides opportunities for advancement through initiative;
•has flexible rules and incentives;
•recognizes both teams and individuals for their accomplishments;

As we ponder what we might do differently we need to remember four rules:

Start where you are.

Use what you have (and what you can readily get your hands on).

Do what you can.

Pause to reflect and learn from your mistakes, from the mistakes of others, and from things/ideas/practices that work.

Additional Operational Rule(s):
•Reuse, Renew, Recycle