Commenting on the communist legacy, a soviet academic Oleg Bogomolov, who must have known a thing or two about things that swim, said “It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but how do you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?”
Mmm, don’t know how you turn a fish soup into an aquarium, but I have known many organization-aquarium being converted into fish soups. Instead of relocating fishes and getting a smaller fish tank, they decided, by the hand of Big Consulting, to go for the soup. It was faster and there were cookbooks. Expensive, but there were.
The Organization Fish Soup has the following characteristic:
There is no slack in the system, resources are exactly what is required to accomplish some tasks.
People in the wrong place at the wrong time were fired, no matter how skillful they may have been to work somewhere else.
Middle management is gone because they were the cause of all plagues.
The ones who were not fired were offered a redundancy package that they could not refuse. The fish tank lost key talent and a great deal of company memory, but the soup tasted delicious to ‘the shareholders’.
The fish soup was portrayed as ’being closer to the customers’ but no costumer ever wanted that closeness. They were told all was done to meet their expectations, but no one recalls being asked about them.
The transformers saw the problem moons before but did nothing and were waiting for a miracle. When the miracle did not materialize, they bought another fish tank and, and then a very big fish tank, and they put all the fishes together. For a little while. The new fish tank changed logos and letterheads.
No C-transformer was ever fired for the mess, no Big Consulting was ever blamed for the lack of critical thinking.
Today, the soup, is in survival mode, at the best doing OK.
Some people in the fish soup ( I mean fish) want to recreate a fish tank, a new, better, slimmer and Googolesque aquarium. But nobody knows how to do it. Chances are they will call the same consultants that create the soup to now recreate the fish tank. Sure, why not?
Call me pessimistic but…