Category: Business adaptability

How Your Company Can Keep Up in a Complex World

One of the first business management consultants was Frederick Taylor. Taylor was an industrial-era management thinker who worked with factories to ensure maximum efficiency in their production processes. By assigning highly-specialized tasks to the employees in the factory, he managed to shave off significant amounts of time from overall production.

Taylor applied scientific principles to his observations about the production process. From those observations, he then wrote The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. In the process, his ideas helped shape current management theory.

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How to Make Sense of This Crazy World

I used to think that I could build a perfectly structured company in which everything would be neat and tidy. I tirelessly designed and organized the company to ensure the structure would be failproof. Little by little, that idea was slowly torn apart as I discovered how little is actually in my control. The world and life itself can change in an instant. An organization will be put under stress and sometimes experience failures no matter how organized it is.

At times the changes may come slowly and are easier to adapt to. Other times, a circumstance may be a game changer and can present itself unexpectedly, to which we have no choice but to adapt. Given that this is how the world operates, how can we succeed in the middle of all this uncertainty? How do we operate effectively in a world that sometimes makes no sense? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some strategies I’ve been experimenting with for some time.

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