Life Imitates Art

One of my favorite syndicated comic is Dilbert. If you don't know what Dilbert is, Dilbert is one of the world's most popular 4 column comic about all the oddities of things you would face in the cubicle - or what you could say your office life.





In one of the columns that I distinguishly remembered well after all these years go by the following:

On Management Genius

If your organization has much red tape, you should decentralize what is centralized to improve organizational efficiency.

If your organization has too little control, you should centralized what is decentralized to put back the sense of direction in the organization.

If you notice the above quotes, you can notice that its similar to the Chicken and Egg question. In addition to that, one additional quote that is very prominent in Dilbert theme books goes as the following:

Organizations reengineer to hide their glaring mistakes and improve shareholder value without any actual work done

By adding all of this together, you can notice one of the huge paradoxes about huge organizations and the way they work. Though these notes are writen in cartoon form, its highly interesting to see how life imitates art.

A very good example would be our government in Thailand. Four years ago, the government hatched an ambition Reengineering project to update the bureacracy by creating many new ministries to take care of issues closer than the previous organization. With much fanfare from many quarters of the society, there were numerous new ministries - which is a boon for politicians (as they get ministrial appointments), the civil service (more positions so many got promotions and increase bloat), and the public (who feels that changes have been done for the better). If you notice, that by adding more Ministries, it is like Decentralizing what is Centralized.

Fast forward four years, after the previous election, one of the news that really took me by surprise, is the PM has stated that he would be combining an number of different ministries together to help improve efficiency due to overlapping duties (if you didn't get it, you can notice that 4 years earlier he added so many ministries that many of the roles were overlapped!). As alot of Thai people have short memories, many of the public greeted this with enthusiam. Though many people look it that way, I have the reason to be skeptical and view it with the second quote in Dilbert - the reorganization process was done to cover the mistakes that have been done earlier. To my understanding, I do believe that in the Thaksin I government, the expanding ministries were used to pacify different factions in the party at the expense of organizational issues. However with Thaksin already gaining control over the various factions and it is deemed no longer necessary to keep as many ministries running with overlapping duties. Also another secondary goal of this reorganization is to provide a smokescreen against the opposition and the check and balance system by changing the system often to hide traces of irregularity - which is something I'm certain this government is full of.

In conclusion to this ramble, I just wanted to point out how strange it is - in how Life Just Imitates Art.