Binary thinking often comes in the way of fruitfully exploring any subject, holding us prisoners of artificially (or unconsciously) polarized ends. Thinking on management is often a victim as it tends to close in rather than open out new vistas of thinking. In what follows, we will restrict the discussion to business organizations.
Control, as a function, is seen as inherently bad and an obstacle in the way of creativity. Anyone even reasonably familiar with the literature on writings on management would have seen voluminous writings on how creativity is vital for an organization to flourish and how control will demotivate and discourage employees and so on. The problem with such debates is that they are like a pendulum – swing from one end to the other. And since this keeps happening from one way to another, we are always caught up in a futile exercise.
The primary point is that an organization is not an indivisible whole or a cohesive unity, but comprising of many parts and elements, each with a designated role some of which need to interact (regularly or otherwise) with others. Only some. Once you drop this false image of indivisibility, you can also be free from the mutually exclusive syndrome.
Let me start with the example of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), a business that touches our lives every day. The business of FMCG is a world of marketing & branding, supply chain & distribution (or just supply chain if you thought of distribution as an integral part of supply chain). A fine combination of creativity and control – the front end and back end, if you may, of one business. FMCG businesses were among the first to incorporate the idea of extended enterprise i.e., an enterprise extends to its suppliers and distributors. In terms of information technology, this meant that they were part of the company’s IT system, with appropriate access levels. This also meant that they built in safeguards to deal with potential leakages, in effect addressing the important dimension of security.
Now supply chain is the perfect terrain for operations research, which is the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to any problem. One of the earliest problems studied by OR was optimal transportation routes. In fact, any problem that involves optimization is OR territory, from understanding the optimal routes for travelling salesmen, fixing distribution points, determining the number of vendors and so on. All of these is highly technical but forms one part of the backbone of any FMCG. Employees in such a function could all be from mathematics and statistics, with none of them having any clue about how to run an FMCG business, and the point is, they don’t need to. Some FMCG companies named their IT department ‘Information and Decision Solutions’, a much better name than Analytics because it shows the direct link between information and decision support. My point here is that there is a part of an FMCG business where control is the preeminent function.
At the other end of the spectrum is marketing & branding, the very soul of an FMCG business, where creativity is everything. Branding is arguably more difficult to understand than nuclear physics, given its elusive character. The depth of research that such businesses engage in to understand brands and their appeal to different demographic sections with a corollary of appropriate advertising is enormous. In the late 1990, when in-film advertising was catching ground, one of the leading global brands in beverages undertook research to evaluate which kind of films it should associate itself with, through in-film advertising. They had to be absolutely sure that their move will not alienate their customers because, as one marketing guru expressed, a brand is owned by the consumer not by the company. This is an extremely slippery ground, which calls for creativity tempered with common sense. Analogically, I am reminded of an astrophysicist saying he was comfortable studying the universe but was completely petrified in front of a tiny insect, so tiny that it was visible only through a microscope, because he just could not fathom it.
One of the most widely considered creative companies, Apple, was no stranger to this twin-phenomenon of control and creativity co-existing but in a very different fashion from what we have just discussed. So paranoid was Steve Jobs that he literally micro-managed every single step, frightened that someone will walk away with sensitive information. Since design was core (actually everything) to its business, Apple was fiercely protective of its designs in the making.
And ironic that the more we tilt towards the use of IT in businesses, the more we are likely to embrace control. Industrial espionage is a quite regular phenomenon. Some of you may recall the bitter controversy over ‘stolen designs’ between an American auto company and European auto company in the 1980s. Studies of security breaches or information leaks underline the fact that more than 50% cases involve employee connivance. Personal integrity is the savior often in a world controlled by technology.
For FMCG companies, this is a particularly critical aspect as they hold an enormous amount of customer data yielding buying patterns. We know this much that information per se is not important but how they connect together. Today, even the law mandates control via the mandate to protect privacy of data. And with so much ‘data’ falling within the trap of social media, control is only going to strengthen rather be relaxed.
All of these is well known and yet we fall a prey to outdated and outmoded ways of thinking, imprisoning us instead of liberating. Let me leave you with a deep but cryptic observation from Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers, who said that there is no free thought because every thought has to follow its own logic. Chew on that!
Takeaways
Control & Creativity can and do co-exist in any organization
Organizations are not an indivisible unity; one part is control and the other creativity
Increasing use of IT makes control inevitable
Privacy of data and protection of business leads to control
We need to be free of outdated and outmoded ways of thinking
