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94 SNAKES IN SUITS
kitchen appliances running, a phone operator to handle telephone orders,
and specialty bakers who can create new and different treats to
help differentiate this bakery’s product from competitors’. Eventually,
the owners may decide to buy or lease trucks so they can deliver large
orders to commercial customers, hire a full-time accountant to do the
books, bring on cleaning staff, a marketing team, and so forth. The
bakery’s success, as with any business venture, relies on several important
factors: how good is its product, how are its customer relations,
and how well does it manage the operations? Managing all this
growth is not easy. To the degree that all the people, all the functions,
and all the equipment work together and cooperate toward the same
end, the business will run smoothly and evolve to meet increasingly
complex business demands. In a perfect world, everything would
run smoothly, but as most readers understand from their own work
experience, this is rarely the case. Without additional organizational
development, our hypothetical family-run business would grow uncontrolled,
quickly running off the track.
Historically, increased size and business complexity brought with
it, out of necessity, bureaucracy, a term many small business owners
dread, but a model of business that evolved to address the needs of
growth. Bureaucracy typically involves a lot of rules and regulations in
the form of systems, processes, and procedures. The recipe for sourdough
bread, which used to reside in the mind of the baker, is now
captured in a “batch sheet” or similar formulation. The original owner’s
insistence on “using only high-quality ingredients” is now called
“following good manufacturing practices.” While this standardization
of things is necessary for success, it does cause a lot of stress.
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