Robert Paterson is in the toppest-of-top form today in his entry Unjobbing. A few snippets:

All the rules of the old culture are based on the assumptions that the most important activity is control. The extension of this assumption is that if only we tried hard enough, we could control everything. This illusion seemed to work when we did not operate in a global society. But when we began to operate in a global economy, the complexity of controlling everything has overwhelmed us. As we talk about being more responsive, more customer-focused and more flexible, let’s look at the real rules that govern most of our organizations. They work against these objectives.

The budget process is the most important process in the traditional organization. Budgets, not value, determine who has the power. Controlling large budgets, large numbers of people and large physical plant is what gives you power. At a time when the jargon is all about being close to the customer, the traditional reward system values being a bureaucrat. The further you are away from the customer, the more powerful you become. Career success is determined by obtaining and using good bureaucratic skills. The result is a managerial emphasis and a bias against creativity....

The external stakeholders, be they investors, bankers or governments, view the enterprise through only one aspect of a balance sheet, financial capital. As the bigger is better approach has taken hold, the financial balance sheet has grown geometrically thus driving up the hurdle rate for earning an economic return. The purpose of the organization tends to become obscured as the pressure to meet the investment hurdle increases. So schools and hospitals are increasingly evaluated in terms of their budgetary impact rather than on any criteria of whether they are educating our children well or not. Businesses cannot afford to miss an operational beat because they have to run their system at full tilt all the time to meet the returns on a large capital structure. Executives are being measured quarter by quarter rather than being given a more appropriate time horizon.

When Rob talks about the relentless drive for efficiency, I think about the City's panic when Marks and Spencer dared post less than sparkling returns in one set of figures. A snapshot provokes demands for resignations. Crazy.

Rob is arguing for a paradigm shift and says the old-style organisations will be highly resistant. I love this kind of full-on, radical thinking.

I believe that the power of the old culture makes it almost impossible to change our organizations from within. The reasons for this failure are not lack of effort or lack of vision but the nature of the cultural reaction to the new. The rules of the old culture operate like an immune system seeking out new and dangerous ideas that threaten the old way of doing things.

I'd like to cheer the almost word that Rob included. Because I think organisations are not as rigidly bound as they think they are. They may attempt to run themselves in the control-freak way Rob describes, but the non-rational and the kind periodically cut-through. More often in some organisations than others, I grant you.

Individuals within systems can find ways to create good relationships despite constraints, and I'd like to believe that the cumulative effect of us each, individually, speaking authentically helps undermine the old paradigm Rob sets out.

They don't create these brands, we do

Ultimately, organisations and brands are not real things, they are figments of our collective imagination. We can imagine them differently.

For instance, my default setting is to loathe the Tesco Metro store at the end of my road. Shopping there is a good sign that my self-esteem is particularly low. The Tesco brand mantra is not very convincing in this cramped shop. If I go with this, I can shop sulkily and resentfully and ignore the human beings working there.

Alternatively I can make the effort to chat to them and engage, and create the outside chance of us both having a more human encounter. In that fleeting moment, they and I both collude to create a different brand of Tesco. And, boy, do I prefer this one to the default. Not least because I am the conscious co-author of it, not Mr Tesco.