An organizational malady.
A beginning is made with a bang and there is a lot of enthusiasm and spirit to do something well. Time passes and drift sets in. In case of business organizations, the market is supposed to take care of drift.
What about non-market organizations?
Right in front of my house stands the large campus of an army school which imparts training to soldiers and officers. A commandant looks after its affairs. The trainees are generally kept very busy. Their day begins at 5 a.m. and ends at 6.15 p.m. with a breakfast and lunch break in between. The trainees are divided into groups of about 30 persons and 1 master, wearing red socks is in charge of 1 group. When the school is full, at least 5 or 6 groups can be seen exercising, playing and doing acrobatics of different types at any time during the day. According to my nephew who was in the air force, these masters are very good people.
For the last fortnight, I have noticed only 2 masters around. They just stand there and leave their charges free. The trainees do not know what to do with themselves. Instead of the normal super active selves, they cut a very sorry figure just standing around. Some of them start exercising, others join or do not. It looks very pathetic.
What could have happened? Is the current commandant not competent? Have some masters been transferred and only 2 left back? Have they been assigned office duty?
I will never know. But I am saddened by this drift.
It was the same in the college in which I taught. Because exams were pretty easy and because teaching was not very stirring, students stopped attending. Then teachers stopped teaching. Instead of taking both to task, the administrators were busy plotting their own career moves. Result: empty classrooms and a dismal ambience.
Of course, it is dangerous to leave 16 to 19 year- old's, boys and girls, together like this. All types of mischief was rife on the campus but teachers and administrators turned a blind eye and things drifted more.
In the army school, I hope the drift will be temporary. In the college, drift was permanent, I am afraid. The college stands but it makes no contribution to anything.
It is the duty of organizational leaders to ensure that drift does not set in.
2 comments:
Drift is a common phenomenon in all organisations. It is far more academia and least perhaps in business, corporates. In school and colleges you are not accountable to anything except for managing thet the students pass out.
Businesses cannot afford to take that kind of attitude.
True. However, drift cannot continue endlessly. In academia, students cotton on to the fact that their time is getting wasted and then colleges and institutes become shells - impressive from outside and nothing of substance inside.
In Pune, we have Bharat Itihas Sanshodhan Mandal, an old (100 years and more) and august body that has done a lot of work for Maratha and Peshwa history. A few years ago, it threw open its life membership to general public. I filled in my application form with alacrity, paid the money and completed the formalities. I was one of a few thousand enthusiasts. I eagerly looked forward to its annual convention in which members present papers and a discussion takes place. I had attended a few in the past and had found them stimulating.
Now I find that no lectures or programmes are held regularly. The annual convention has been shortened and paper- reading scrapped. The few programmes which I attended were very poor in quality. I realized that well-known and talented historians had left the body and it was a case of capture by mediocrity. It was another facet of drift.
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