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Adizes Methodology (PAEI) PAEI Welcome page

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The Adizes Methodology, my reference model for all of the concern
structure models gathered for this study, can be difficult to describe. It Documentation pages
has called a management intervention technique, a business revitalization
program and an organizational therapy. It is an eleven-phase How to join this site?
methodology developed by Ichak Adizes, formerly a professor from the
Site members
John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. The Adizes
Methodology is a set of practices and procedures for optimizing Recent changes
organizational function on an ongoing basis. These practices are carried
out by the management team of Adizes client organizations, facilitated by List all pages
Adizes or one of his licensed associates. One stated goal of the Page Tags
Methodology is to help organizations reach and remain in a dynamic state
that optimally balances flexibility and control as conditions change. This Site Manager
state is called Prime.
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The Methodology itself – the explicit 11-phase process used to diagnose
and solve problems within the organization – is a proprietary resource It seems you have no
available only to Adizes clients. However, the conceptual tags attached to pages.
framework supporting that Methodology is in the public domain, having To attach a tag simply
been published in many forms. The Adizes Methodology is typically click on the tags button
understood to include this conceptual framework, such that the term at the bottom of any
‘Methodology’ is flexibly used to apply both to the publicly available page.
conceptual material and the 11-phase proprietary intervention plan. My
use of the terms ‘Adizes’ and ‘Adizes Methodology’ refers only to the Add a new
conceptual framework, not the intervention program. page
Books on the Adizes conceptual framework include Mastering Change,
Managing Corporate Lifecycles,
new page
Management/Mismanagement Styles, Leading the Leaders and The Ideal
Executive, among others, described in more detail at www.adizes.com. edit this panel

fold
Table of Contents
Situating the Adizes Methodology
PAEI: The Adizes Concern Structure Model
Adizes Prototypical Management Styles
Producers
Administrators
Entrepreneurs
Integrators
Conflict of Styles
Adizes Mismanagement Styles
The Lone Ranger
The Bureaucrat
 The Arsonist
The Super Follower
Finding Balance
Adizes Organizational Lifecycles
Courtship [paEi]
Infancy [Paei]
Go-Go [PaEi]
Adolescence [pAEi]
Prime [PAEI]
Stable [PA-I]
Aristocracy [-A-I]
Early Bureaucracy [-A]
Late Bureaucracy [-A]
Death [——]
References

Situating the Adizes Methodology

Conceptually, the Adizes Methodology is a contingency theory of human
organizations, which makes use of a competing values framework to
describe management dynamics and organizational lifecycle dynamics.
Contingency or congruency theories in organizational studies emphasize
that there is no single best type of organization. Instead, these theories
emphasize the importance of fit (Aldrich, 1979[7]). Fitness can be
described as the ‘aligning’ or ‘matching’ of organizational resources to
environmental opportunities and threats (Andrews, 1971[8]; Chandler,
1962[9]).

'Organizational resources' must be taken to include both collective and

individual management styles, abilities, behaviors, values and aspirations
(Szilagyi & Schweiger, 1984[11]; Tichy, 1982[12]). Peters and Waterman
(1982[10]) summarize these resources as seven “S’s”: strategy,
structure, systems, style, staff, skills and shared values. Organizations
that fit their circumstances well align all of these elements with each
other and with external opportunities and threats. Achieving this fit is the
essence of good management, on the contingency theory view.

The concept of a competing values theory, which I use here as a general

term, was initially developed by Quinn et al. to describe their own
theoretical approach to management intervention and pedagogy. The
Adizes Methodology can be described as a contingency theoretical
approach to organizational management that analyses all the components
of fitness using a competing values (or concern structure) framework.

PAEI: The Adizes Concern Structure Model

There are several ways to introduce the Adizes model of the structure of
concern. Most of them involve introducing some key distinctions between
the competing values in question. For example, two competing values
underlying the Adizes model (among others) are the values of
effectiveness and efficiency. These two values are different, and not
entirely compatible, in that both cannot be maximized simultaneously.

In the Adizes Methodology, effectiveness is defined as “obtaining results

which somebody needs”, and efficiency is defined as “conducting
activities with minimal waste”. We can obtain needed results very quickly
and reliably if we spare no cost in obtaining them, but then our resources
will be depleted and unavailable for more work. We must also conserve
our resources and work efficiently. However, over-concern with efficiency
can lead to activities being under-resourced, which can compromise the
attainment of results.

Determining a suitable trade-off between the mobilization and

conservation of energy is thus necessary for every decision, and this
judgment must be made under conditions of some risk or uncertainty.
However, taking both concerns explicitly into account when deciding
makes it much easier to adapt and adjust the trade-off quickly in the
early stages of implementation. Striking a workable balance between
effectiveness and efficiency in the attainment of our goals is important for
reaching a quality decision.

Adizes also introduces a temporal dimension that cuts across the

effectiveness/efficiency dimension. Decisions can be effective and
efficient in the short run, but over longer periods of time those decisions
can be shown to be ineffective and inefficient. One effective way to end a
conflict between two employees is to fire both of them. No more conflict!
As a general strategy, however, this approach to conflict will depopulate
the organization. It is not effective in the long run.

Similarly, it can be more efficient in the short term to reduce job

redundancy and minimize job overlap. But if no one knows much about
their neighbors’ jobs, then when someone is ill or away, others cannot
take up the slack. The whole overspecialized team might be immobilized
if one of the specialists is unavailable. Allowing some overlap facilitates
learning, so that team members can fill in for each other when needed.
The imperatives of short-term efficiency and long-term efficiency are not
identical to each other.

Short term effectiveness and efficiency alone are inadequate. Quality

decisions must be both effective and efficient in the short and long run.
These four functional horizons are illustrated below:

Layered over these four functional horizons, Adizes describes four

corresponding activities: Producing, Administrating, Entrepreneuring and
Integrating. These activities address short-term and long-term
effectiveness and efficiency.

In the Adizes framework, Producing is the activity of attaining short term

or immediate results, and Administrating is the activity of minimizing
waste in ongoing activities. Entrepreneuring is the activity of seeking out
and recognizing new opportunities or new orientations to the
environment, and Integrating is the activity of coordinating shared
attention and identification. Integration keeps organizations socially and
functionally cohesive, preventing them from degenerating into
mechanical, purely formally interrelated collections of functionally isolated
individuals. When it operates properly, the organization becomes an
organic unit that can survive even when key people leave the
organization. Integration makes a whole that is more than the sum of its
parts – one in which no single person on the team is indispensable. Any
individual can step down from their position to be replaced by someone
else, and the organization will still be what it is.

One advantage of the Adizes Methodology as a frame of reference for this

study is that Adizes abbreviates his four categories of Producing,
Administrating, Entrepreneuring and Integrating using just the four first
letters of each word – PAEI. This makes it easier to disembed the
concerns he lists for each value set, taking them out of their context in
organizational studies to apply them more broadly as a possible features
of some larger reality.

It might seem easy to make good quality decisions, since we only need to
consider four simple concerns. However, people are very likely to
disagree on the right balance of priorities for any given situation. Each
concern requires decision-makers to adopt certain preoccupations,
motivations, values, instincts and priorities. But due to personal
preferences, some concerns appeal to us more than others. We each
have biases towards or away from different styles of concern.
Furthermore, we are very unlikely to be equally skilled at solving
problems in all four styles of concern, because talent in one biases
against talent in others (e.g. a talent for quick, snap decisions and a
talent for long, careful meticulous decisions are hard to maximize within
the same person).
An implication is that something in our biological organization makes it
impossible to operate with equal brilliance in all four quadrants of
concern. We are not wired up to be extremely talented in all four styles of
concern at once. Most people will have a dominant style, a second strong
style, a third competent style and a final weak style. We can attain
‘foursquare’ excellence only by teaming up with other people whose
talents and preferences are different from ours. This creates synergy. It
also necessarily entails conflict among collaborators.

If it is kept constructive, conflict is a positive development.

Incompatibilities on teams can be leveraged to produce better group
decisions by ensuring that all four functional horizons receive due
consideration. Teams can thereby accomplish the well-rounded
decisionmaking that individuals will always find more difficult to do, given
the inevitability of personal biases and preferences. To understand
conflict in decision-making, and to use it constructively rather than
destructively, these
preferences and biases have to be generally understood.

Adizes illustrates these biases through the construction of four allegorical

or prototypical personality profiles: the Producer, the Administrator, the
Entrepreneur and the Integrator. These characters
exemplify the styles he describes. They are introduced below, and they
illustrate the structure of concern in the field of personality, although the
characters are clearly simplified. Each one represents a single,
unadmixed dominant style, rather than the unique mixture of all four
styles that
characterizes most adult human beings.

Adizes Prototypical Management Styles

Producers

Producers are high energy, active people. They like to be busy all the
time, and their interests are overwhelmingly concrete. They love to attain
tangible results, and to attain them often. They feel highly rewarded
every time they can declare a task complete. Producers dislike fussy
details, ambiguous situations or abstract considerations. They have little
patience with future-oriented tasks and wild brainstorming. They are
much more interested in getting a task done than they are in ensuring
that their colleagues are happy with the way it got done. They will
denigrate these kinds of interpersonal concerns, feeling that the rapid
attainment of concrete results justifies the suspension of other concerns.
This can make them unpleasant to be around at times, but they are
responsible for driving many organizational achievements. Producers help
us stop talking about solutions
and start implementing on them.

Administrators

Administrators are quiet, cautious people who are less concerned with
what we should do than how we should do it. They need to know what
process or procedure we are planning to use before they can join in on
the action. They are extremely uncomfortable with ambiguity or
uncertainty, and they are made uneasy by unstructured environments
and by group reliance on spontaneity and improvisation. Unplanned
activities feel distressingly chaotic to them. Administrators prefer to
construct a system of routines and conventions for ongoing activities, so
they can be conducted in the smoothest and least disruptive manner
possible. In organizational contexts, they bring stability and order to
collective activities. They are slow and careful in decision-making because
they track each detail to make certain it is handled properly. They also
weigh the impact of any proposed changes on the entire stabilizing
network of rules that they maintain. They may say “no” to new proposals
as a reflex, in order to slow things down so they can think through the
proposal and deliver a revised opinion once they have worked through
their concerns. Administrators may see Producers as sloppy loose canons
wreaking havoc upon organizational operations. Producers may see
Administrators as fussy obstructionists.

Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are easily typecast as dreamers. They are not interested in

the results we are attaining today, and would rather focus on bigger
potential achievements in the future. Entrepreneurs feel stifled by the
demands of ongoing activities. The here-and-now is a trap. Entrepreneurs
are energized by novel challenges, exciting opportunities, new
possibilities and future achievements. They are talkative and charismatic.
Their excitement is highly infectious, and they love being at the center of
attention. They are flamboyant, expressive and very easily bored. They
can come up with several very different grand future schemes every few
minutes, when inspired.

Entrepreneurs scan the environment constantly for changes, in their drive

for novelty. They love aligning themselves with new developments, and
fomenting more change in those new directions. They track activities at a
very high level of abstraction, looking for trends and anomalies.
Producers are highly skeptical of this abstract exploration of mere
possibilities, where there is a clear to-do list for the here and now.
Administrators see Entrepreneurs as either irrelevant or dangerous.
Entrepreneurs want to dramatically change the whole game an
organization is playing, with no detailed sense of what the new rules will
be. This cannot be squared easily with Administrator concerns about how
to best do what we are currently doing.

Entrepreneurs are the only managers who seek out and stimulate major
changes. They are easily dismissed, but it is fatal for organizations to
shut them out. Change is inevitable, and the structure of Entrepreneurial
agency allows them to help the whole team anticipate and adapt to
change in
a timely, proactive manner.

Integrators

Integrators are team-builders with the organization. They manage the

interpersonal, interdepartmental, supplier and client relationships that
allow the organization to function together as one organic whole. They
attend to peoples’ needs, views, motivators, complaints and conflicts to
foster a constructive working environment. Integrators help people focus
on shared goals. They are less concerned about formal roles and titles,
and more concerned that people pull together, each and all doing
whatever it takes to achieve their collective mission. The measure of an
Integrator’s success is his or her ability to take a vacation. He or she can
step away from the organization for periods of time because it is well
Integrated and functions as an organic whole.

In meetings where Producers are pushing for a quick decision about what
to do, Administrators are slowing things down to make sure we carefully
consider how best to proceed, and Entrepreneurs are questioning why we
are even doing any of that now, when a new long-term plan is more
attractive, Integrators are thinking about who we are, who is in the room
and who our other stakeholders are. Integrators are trying to align
concerns and interests, turning us into a combined and unified
(organically integrated) force, in touch (integrated) with our social
surroundings.

Producers do not have adequate patience for integration work. Their

impatience is important for rapid task execution, but they typically
tolerate damage to team integration in order to get things done.
Administrators are more abstract in their focus than Integrators. In
administrative mode, persons are defined according to roles specified in
policies and procedures. No procedure defines the unique elements of
interpersonal or group interaction that Integrators are so attentive to and
aware of.

Entrepreneurs are also less concrete than Integrators. They can get lost
in hypothetical futures. They prefer to be at the center of attention rather
than sharing the spotlight, let alone stepping into the wings to observe
and support others. None of these other three management styles focus
on people in the way that Integrators do. They all focus in one way or
another on tasks. Integration is the only function focused on the
organization itself as a group of people pulling together to exert more
power as a team than any of them could do individually.

Conflict of Styles

As mentioned earlier, the four characters mentioned above are allegorical.

The Adizes Methodology holds that under normal circumstances, all
people are able to operate in all four management modes. However, we
are naturally strongest in only one of the four styles, almost from birth. A
secondary style develops as we mature, and by adulthood we are usually
very capable in our second mode. A third style can be learned with more
effort, and in our weakest style we can function but will almost always
benefit from some help. Our accomplishments in our weakest mode will
never be as swift, easy and natural as achievement in our dominant
modes. Teaming up with someone whose style profile complements ours
is the only way to address all four horizons of concern with equal
competence. In order for this teaming up to work, we have to respect the
different values and priorities of our complementary partners. Conflict is
guaranteed, but mutual respect keeps it
constructive.

Our inability to be strongly talented in all four styles does not stem from
any particular human frailty. The styles themselves are in conflict, such
that strong performance on one of them requires characteristics that
work against strong performance in others. The following table illustrates
some of these conflicts.

Different styles use different tactics to realize different strategies. When

people lack respect for other styles, this can lead them to devalue the
imperatives and concerns proper to the other styles. If this devaluation is
extreme, the person may cease to function in the devalued style. They
may
even cease to recognize the existence of that class of concerns. They
begin to manage all of their problems with the conspicuous disregard of a
whole category of concerns, and their decisions begin to show predictable
patterns of failure. The unbalanced kind of management that ensues is
called
mismanagement in the Adizes Methodology.

The complete loss of even one style results in mismanagement and

predictable patterns of failure, but the clearest and most visible forms of
mismanagement arise when full reliance is placed on one and only one
management style. All other styles and priorities are denigrated and
disrespected.
These mismanagement styles help to highlight the competing values
within the model. They are described below, one for each PAEI element.

Adizes Mismanagement Styles

The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger is a perpetually busy manager who only cares about
results. Lone Rangers are perfectly willing to trample over peoples’
feelings, to violate proper procedure, and to cut short discussions about
possibilities just so that known tasks can be executed quickly. Quality of
execution matters much less than task completion. Lone Rangers prefer
to do all tasks themselves, because for any one task it is easier and
quicker for them to do it themselves rather than training someone else to
do it. This has the ironic outcome that Lone Rangers – who are interested
in rapid execution to the exclusion of all else – end up becoming
bottlenecks in the organization where work sometimes grinds to a near
halt. Lone Rangers do not build effective work teams around them. Their
employees tend to become simple errand-runners for the Lone Ranger as
he or she manages tasks by crisis.

Lone Rangers leave work late and arrive early the next day in order to
get things done. Their employees leave early and arrive late, because
there is essentially nothing for them to do.
Lone Rangers make poor managers because they try to manage tasks
directly, rather than managing the team that does the tasks. Their strong
preference for concrete, tangible results and their inability to assess other
kinds of outcomes leads to this untenable situation. Lone Rangers place a
severe limitation on the capacity of a team to grow. The team never gains
the capacity to do more work than the Lone Ranger him or herself is
capable of doing.

The Bureaucrat

Unlike Lone Rangers, Bureaucrats do not care about concrete or tangible

results in the slightest. However, they are extremely concerned with how
things are done, with procedures, rules and practices. They spend their
time scrutinizing behavior on their teams to make sure that prescribed
methods are being followed. If an employee was to circumvent a rule or
two to accomplish some important task, this would be a disaster. The
Bureaucrat would devote all energies to punishing the wrongdoer for
side-stepping a rule, completely ignoring the important results that this
side-stepping made possible. No results in the world would justify “taking
shortcuts”. Just because taking shortcuts worked this time does not mean
it will work next time. Rather, total chaos and an unspeakable cascade of
complications might occur, violating rule after rule after rule. Better to
follow the rules – that’s the point. The rules say we should follow the
rules, and so those are the rules we should follow. It’s the only way.

Bureaucrats hate improvisation and uncertainty in work behavior. They

develop and release policies and procedures for everything, firmly
believing that any policy is better than no policy around a task.
Subordinates are expected to demonstrate that they followed proper
procedure in everything they do, and innovation or improvisation is either
discouraged or positively punished. The rules are seen as the guarantee
that the team will not get into trouble. Bureaucrats end up managing the
rules, with no attention paid to the experiences of stakeholders outside of
the rules. The organization
may become insolvent and go under, but it will do so on time and
according to regulations.

Everyone in bureaucratic organizations leaves work on time and arrives

on time the next day. In the interim, they manage to look busy and keep
things neat and well-organized, whether or not they are doing work that
actually delivers any real value to internal or external stakeholders. The
irony of bureaucracy is that the desire for order leads to such a massive
proliferation of rules and policies that people become disoriented. The
drive for order produces chaos, and the destruction that rules were put in
place to prevent ends up sweeping away the whole work unit, which has
stopped
delivering value to stakeholders.

The Arsonist

In their own minds, Arsonist are visionaries, about to revolutionize the

world and garner the attention of all due to their genius and originality.
Their favorite event is the announcement: the announcement of a new
grand plan, great vision, new direction, innovative campaign, etc. They
love these announcements and the commotion that they cause. They love
to see their employees cheer and scramble to reorganize themselves in
order to enact a new vision. The problem is, after a short period of time,
once all the excitement dies down and the hard work of implementing the
plans begins in earnest, Arsonists begin to get bored. In their boredom,
they begin to dream up new grand schemes and new directions. This all
builds up to a new announcement and a new great vision for employees
to follow. The old projects they had been giving their attention to are now
seen as irrelevant.

Since this happens with great regularity, employees are constantly forced
to change directions. Their manager only appears among them to start
new fires, watching everyone scramble to cope with them. Employees are
eventually forced to ignore their manager – to applaud enthusiastically to
newly announced ideas, but to ignore the substance of those new
announcements and to continue working on some project or another to
the point of completion. The irony of the Arsonist is that someone who
craves being at the center of everyone’s attention and esteem ends up
being
irrelevant, marginalized and ignored by all around them.

The Super Follower

Super Followers are consummate political animals. They often have no

sense of any of the issues that are at stake, but they have an extremely
strong awareness of the conditions for political survival surrounding those
issues. Super Followers thus do not stand for or represent anything in
particular. They simply echo or parrot back the mood and language of the
powerful or the dominant clique. Super Followers are sometimes so good
at following that they do so before anyone has a chance to lead. They will
gauge the mood, tone and emerging consensus of a meeting, and then
stand up and articulate that consensus as if it was their own contribution.
They will only do this when they feel certain of the consensus, however.
Super Followers are conflict averse, so if they are confronted with some
residual conflict while they try to articulate the consensus, they may shift
their articulated position on a dime, so as always to seem to be in
agreement with whoever they are interacting with. This kind of face-to-
face agreement characterizes all of their interactions with important or
powerful people. The issues don’t matter. Being on the right side is the
only thing they care about.

Super Followers like one particular type of subordinate; one who listens
in on conversations, who has friends throughout the organization, and
who feeds this information to the Super Follower to help him or her in
political intrigue – a gossip. Super Followers do occasionally become
leaders
of organizations, and when they do, they still seek out a powerful
reference group to please. There will be a set of stakeholders,
constituents or commentators that the Super Follower will try to impress
and appease. They “govern by opinion poll”, taking no particular stand on
any issues until it is clear what the reference group wants to hear.

It does not matter to the Super Follower if the organization drifts away
from its actual mandate as a result of all of this impression management.
It only matters if powerful onlookers criticize the Super Follower for
allowing this drift to happen. They way things are is of no concern to the
Super Follower. All that matters is the way things look. The irony of
course is that a sole focus on form over function leads to scandalous
failures of function that can expose a Super Follower for what he or she
is, a confused mismanager with narrow priorities interested primarily in
their own position, rather than the good of the whole organization. By
worrying exclusively about looking good, they end up looking pathetically
bad.

Finding Balance

The truth is that in any adaptive situation, all four concerns are going to
be relevant, though not to the same degree. In the organization of first
response emergency services, for example, rational order and
organization (A) are very important, to enable quick responses (P).
However, complex and
cumbersome regulations can actually impede first responders, so finding
the right balance of P and A is crucial for this predominantly Productive
function. Similarly, training scenarios and simulations of possible
disasters (E) are important for emergency preparedness, but these
scenarios should not
be misrecognized as exhaustive of the true range of possible situations
that first responders may be faced with (P). It must always be
remembered that truth is stranger than fiction, and that P-style on-the-
ground, results-driven flexibility matters more than prior rehearsal.
Finally, I-style concerns
regarding the cohesiveness between different response services are
important, as is the degree of Integration within the community being
helped. Ideally, there will have been a long-term investment in I, since
well integrated communities pull together in a crisis. If this was not done,
the lack of I in a region will bedevil efforts to aid victims no matter how
severe their privation.

In real situations, the right schedule of PAEI priorities can be very difficult
to determine, and given the inevitable biases of individuals, assessing
PAEI needs is fundamentally a team activity. It takes a minimum of two
people with complementary PAEI strengths who also share mutual
respect for each others’ relative strengths, to assess and make decisions
that cover all PAEI priorities adequately. Their conflicting perspectives are
what generate the information needed to make quality decisions. In order
for that conflict to be productive, however, mutual respect must be
preserved. Disrespect for any of the four concerns will lead to predictable
patterns of failure or suboptimal performance, along with the ironic traps
attendant to the various styles of individual or group mismanagement.
 Adizes Organizational Lifecycles
The brief and incomplete survey of Adizes management and
mismanagement styles above shows how the Adizes concern structure is
manifested at the psychological level. Prior to that, we saw how the
concern structure defined four functional imperatives of achieving long
and short term effectiveness and efficiency. A third zone of application of
concern structure thinking in the Adizes Methodology arises in the
context of its theory of organizational lifecycle dynamics. (For another
personality-typed organizational lifecycle model, see Bridges (2000)).

Like other lifecycle models, the Adizes organizational lifecycle describes

several phases in the life of any project, from inception and growth
through to maturation and decline. However, the Adizes lifecycle
describes this maturational arc in PAEI (concern structure) terms. The
lifecycle is
described in ten phases: Courtship, Infancy, Go-Go, Adolescence, Prime,
Stable, Aristocracy, Early Bureaucracy, Late Bureaucracy and Death. Each
phase has its unique PAEI needs, and specific consequences for PAEI
mismatches. The phases and their concern structure requirements are
described below.

Courtship [paEi]

The phase of Courtship involves the potential founder of a new project or

organization talking to others about the opportunity, building enthusiasm
and support for the new idea. This lifecycle phase is dominated by the
Entrepreneuring function. Dreams and ideas for new projects or
enterprises
are exciting! The enthusiasm of the originator of the idea can be
profoundly contagious, pulling other people into the excitement. This
excitement is what fuels the creation of the founding team and the
willingness of supporters to consider investment. A grand vision is being
proposed. The potential new
founder is often very charismatic at this stage in the organizational
lifecycle, impassioned and full of big dreams, though sketchy on details.
The excitement must thus be directed towards motivating people to
reality-test the new Entrepreneurial concept.

The concept must be tested. Some details need to be filled out. Although
this is an E-dominant lifecycle stage, P and A cannot be absent. The
realism of the dream must be assessed, but not too harshly. We must not
dampen the growing excitement of the founding team too much. That
excitement must be harnessed to build commitment among people who
join the enterprise, proportionate to the risks of the venture. If
commitment does not develop, then the Courtship burns out as an Arson-
like Affair, a product of E-style activity only, generating a lot of flash and
noise but producing no lasting value.

Infancy [Paei]

Most new ventures die in Courtship. However, if the results of reality-

testing are positive, and if the founders and their supporters make
commitments of time, energy and resources to the project, it moves into
the extraordinarily busy Infancy stage. Long-term visions take a back
seat to securing the resources (cash) simply to stay afloat from moment
to moment. The pressure for survival forces us to “make things up as we
go along”. Few systems can be established, because of the opportunistic
nature of all activities.

This is normal and not life-threatening. At this rate of change it would be

a mistake to try to regularize behavior too much. It is also normal for
delegation to be poor and uneven at this stage. Founders end up doing
almost everything themselves, or they delegate in a haphazard, slightly
Lone Ranger manner. A, E and I are not absent in Infancy, however.
Longer-term strategies are needed, along with simple systems and
support for team members, who will be facing extreme demands. If
support dwindles, and if resource commitments to the Infant organization
are too meager, it will suffer Infant Mortality, crumbling as an impossibly
challenging enterprise with too little support.

Go-Go [PaEi]

After a cycle of E generating exciting new ideas and P making things

happen out of raw materials and grit, the two energies come together to
build on their successes. Following some hard effort, the organization will
gain scope and some security of income (if the founding vision was clear
in the
first place). The organization will be paying for itself, no longer requiring
protection or support from the outside. The founders will be able to lean
back and see the organization moving on its own steam, while at the
same time opportunities for more work appear everywhere. The Go-Go
organization is like a toddler, growing quickly, touching everything they
come across, and
gaining new experience and capability all the time. Founders can come to
have too many priorities, making it impossible for them to continue to
lead the organization as individuals.

A challenging transition is required. Founders have to offload some

decision-making control, delegating it to other members of the
organization. Entrepreneurship has to be decentralized too, so that
people can pursue initiatives of various kinds without consulting the
founder for each and every
project. If over-centralized control is maintained (both P and E are focal
or centralizing styles) then the organization will never grow any larger
than that size which the founder can personally manage as a single
individual. There will be a Lone Ranger-like bottleneck at the top of the
organization, called the Founder’s Trap. In order to grow past this point,
the organization has to grow bigger than the founding group can directly
control. They have to reorganize themselves, and they have to learn how
to work with others.

Adolescence [pAEi]

Adolescence is a rebirth and emergence into the phase of maturity. It

requires the organization to take an inward turn, to analyze, organize and
rationalize their own organizational structure. The previously sales-driven
Infant-Go-Go culture (PE) must now focus on streamlining procedures,
trimming waste and boosting profits (A), even if that means that sales
numbers go down. Furthermore, the ad hoc, relationship-based reporting
lines and job descriptions need to be dissolved and replaced by a more
principled organizational structure. Professional managers with business
school backgrounds may be hired to do this, but they will immediately be
at odds with the founding group. The newcomers will treat the job as a
job, and they will not understand all of the relationships and customs that
were built up among the old-timers. There will be some pressure to oust
these technocratic-seeming newcomers. Or alternatively, there may be
pressure
applied by the new professional managers to oust the founders for their
ad hoc, unschooled, intuitive manner of running a large company.

If these forces are not harmonized, a Divorce between the two factions
may ensue. The old-timers (PE) may expel the newcomers (A), leading to
an organization that almost but never quite reaches its full potential as a
whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This kind of Divorce is
named the Unfulfilled Entrepreneur, describing the inability of the
founders to realize the full potential of their organization.

Alternatively, the newcomers (A) may take over and oust the founders,
losing all of the energy, vision and insight (E) that the founding group has
developed in creating the company from scratch. The remaining
administratively-oriented technocratic managers will then rationalize the
company, improve profits briefly, and then run out of ideas. The E that
guides the company will be gone. This kind of Divorce is called Premature
Aging. The ousting of E by A leads to an ossified organization that can no
longer grow or adapt to changes in the marketplace.

Prime [PAEI]

Prime is the target state for any organization. Prime organizations have
the flexibility to adapt to change and the control to produce predictable
results. Prime results when the conflicts of adolescence are resolved, and
Integration is achieved between A and E, creating a flexible structure.
This flexible structure allows the organization to turn its attention
outwards again,
producing results for clients with all of the vision and aggressiveness of a
Go-Go organization, but in a much more predictable fashion. The
organization can do more, and do better as well, continuing to enjoy
efficiency gains from process improvements.

Tension between E and A – the forces for change and for stability – are
always at odds, however, and the impulse to ignore directions or details
and simply produce results is at odds with both. The Prime organization is
thus always oscillating between the launch of new projects and new
ventures,
and the day to day management of less volatile, older projects. If the
organization grows complacent, it may delay or stop launching new
projects, and just ride out the momentum of previous accomplishments.
This manifests itself first as a lack of E. Losing E means the loss of the
organization’s capacity for innovation. The company may still grow, but at
a slower and slower rate. The complacent organization will eventually
suffer a major reversal of fortune.

Stable [PA-I]
A stable organization is an organization in trouble. By all metrics the
organization is still doing well, and there is a solid history of success
behind it. The mood within the organization is self-congratulatory. The
founders and other key managers may feel that they have finally
“arrived”. They may feel that they have discovered the formulas for
lasting success, and they may begin simply applying those formulas
instead of attending to changing client needs. People feel secure in the
dominant position of their organization. A sense of entitlement can come
to characterize their attitude towards success, and they stop listening to
others outside the organization, slowly losing touch with new changing
developments. These organizations are often large, and they become
slow in responding to change. They have crossed a crucial line between
maturing and aging. They are starting to die.

Aristocracy [-A-I]

If Stable organizations persist in their withdrawal from contact with the

outside world, they degenerate further into Aristocracies. Cash piles up in
Aristocratic organizations, which unlike Prime organizations have no new
ventures lined up and waiting for investment. Aristocracies may buy other
organizations, often Go-Go companies, to try to inject the missing energy
and vitality back into the group. However, the heavy top-down
administration of Aristocratic organizations often smothers the energetic
Go-Gos. Aristocracies are often takeover targets themselves, due again to
their tendency to pile up cash. When they are taken into other
organizations, their ineffectiveness and remoteness from their client base
may become painfully obvious.

Aristocracies also invest in sumptuous headquarters and executive

perquisites. The organization begins to feel like an exclusive country club.
Membership and codes of conduct for members preoccupy the leadership,
and even though many people are aware that effectiveness has been lost,
nobody breaks ranks to express the bad news. Those last few who might
are marginalized and finally excluded. Form rules over function.

Early Bureaucracy [-A—]

The eighth stage of the Adizes organizational lifecycle has been

repeatedly renamed over the years. It has been called “Salem City”,
because when the loss of effectiveness in the organization can no longer
be hidden, and the momentum of past successes runs out, the united
front of Aristocratic
denial ruptures, and the hunt for scapegoats begins. Everybody begins to
blame everyone else. Usually, the last few productive leaders are the first
to be purged. Occasional purges continue, and this activity continues to
divert attention from the actual marketplace and the client needs the
organization serves. Customers continue to be treated like inconvenient
annoyances that distract people from the “really” important work of
internal politics.

Late Bureaucracy [-A—]

In the aftermath of the witch hunts, form is all that remains. If a

functioning organization based on client needs was not reestablished in
the reorganization of the early bureaucracy, all that gets left behind is a
network of rules, regulations and practices masquerading as an
organization. This
explicit control and order is seen as an antidote to the chaos of Early
Bureaucracy. The cohesive culture of the Aristocracy is swept away,
leaving a set of rules and strictures in its place. Top managers, middle
managers and workers may all come and go without much effect. The
organization has its own inertia and cannot be redirected or budged from
where it is.

Bureaucracies grow. The effort to eliminate all gray areas and uncertainty
leads to an increasingly minute specification of work roles and
responsibilities, further and further removed from any real service that
could be delivered to an external client. The organization has long since
ceased to
produce any kind of value proportionate to its vast and cumbersome size,
and it is almost entirely insulated from change.

Only some kind of external subsidy keeps Bureaucracies afloat. If they

were dependent on client billing of any kind to generate income, they
would immediately have to reduce their size and reinvent themselves as
a client-centered, productive and competitive organization. Otherwise,
once
their subsidy is removed, they decline towards Death.

Death [——]

Organizational Death is rarely an event. It is usually a drawn-out process

of the slow withdrawal of subsidies, reductions in size of the organization
and final client abandonment of the system. Finally, no one is committed
to the organization any longer; not its management, not its workers, not
its clients and not its political supporters. Death is characterized by
expressions of learned helplessness, and it is prolonged by an
unwillingness to eliminate jobs. Maintaining a dead organization on the
artificial life support system of subsidies is extremely expensive and
usually
occurs for purely political reasons.

References
 Bibliography
1. Adizes, I. (1979). How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis.
Homewood, Illinois: Dow Jones-Irwin.
2. Adizes, I. (1991). Mastering Change: The Power of Mutual Trust and
Respect in Personal Life, Family Life, Business and Society. Santa Monica,
California: Adizes Institute Publications.
3. Adizes, I. (1999). Managing Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why
Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (Revised Ed.). New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
4. Adizes, I. (2004a). The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and
What to Do About It. Santa Barbara, California: Adizes Institute
Publishing.
5. Adizes, I. (2004b). Leading the Leaders: How to Enrich Your Style of
Management and Handle People Whose Style is Different from Yours.
Santa Barbara, California: Adizes Institute Publishing.
6. Adizes, I. (2004c). Management/Mismanagement Styles: How to
Identify a Style and What To Do About It. Santa Barbara, California:
Adizes Institute Publishing.
7. Aldrich, H. E. (1979). Organizations and Environments. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
8. Andrews, K. R. (1971). The Concept of Corporate Strategy.
Homewood, Illinois: Dow Jones-Irwin.
9. Chandler, A. D. (1962). Strategy and structure: Chapters in the history
of American industrial enterprise. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press.
10. Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence:
Lessons from America's best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row.
11. Szilagyi, A. D., & David M. Schweiger. (1984). “Matching Managers to
Strategies: A Review and Suggested Framework”. The Academy of
Management Review, 9(4), 626-637.
12. Tichy, N. M. (1982). “Managing change strategically: The technical,
political, and cultural keys”. Organizational Dynamics, Autumn, 59-80.
page revision: 23, last edited: 14 Dec 2008, 23:59 (3458 days ago)

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