The company: living entity or machine? How you treat it determines its performance.(SELECTED * TOPIC)

People have always known instinctively that a human enterprise is a living, breathing entity that grows and ages, sickens and heals, flourishes and fails. It is something that is organic in nature. It has personality and the ability to learn and to reproduce. It has personhood. It is something that is much greater than the sum of its functions. It is much different than the sum of its people.

This personhood is most easily recognized at both ends of the spectrum of corporate success. World-class companies exhibit a character of focus, power and oneness that is palpable even to a casual visitor. Companies in deep distress show a personality that is equally vivid but fragmented, fearful and impotent.

All companies have this personhood, whether it is strong or weak, potent or ineffective, motivating or destructive. These corporate personae have inner lives at least as complex and as richly tapestried as people do. Not only do these inner lives coexist with the external results of corporate success and failure, but also actually precede and cause them. In our work, we find about 150 attributes of corporate personality that can cause, effect or predict bottom-line performance.

Entrepreneurial and charismatic leaders have always known this quite intuitively and use it to lead, motivate and transform their companies. They use their organizations' living energies to magnify their leadership and their ambition for their companies. They alter elements of their companies' inner lives to force changes in the externals. They may not talk about it (for many would be too embarrassed), but they think about their companies as persons.

For more than 80 years, definitely since the advent of "scientific management", the company-as-machine paradigm has become the model most used. It is used particularly when expanding, changing or improving organizations is attempted.

Unquestionably, such a model has its uses. Certainly it is easy to teach and understand. Undoubtedly it lends itself to ready analysis. It also has profound limitations. It is as limited as the model of a human body without its life; without its spirit.

Changing the inert, spiritless human body can only be done mechanically. The results can be no more than was done to it. The body without its life can offer no response, no help. It has no ability to further what has been done to it. Decay is the only possible result.