| La
variété requise dans l'entreprise : a bilingual page |
 Selon
la "loi de la variété requise" énoncée dans le cadre
de la théorie des systèmes, la complexité du système de contrôle
doit être au moins égale à celle du système contrôlé; (translation)
comme les systèmes de contrôle sont eux-mêmes susceptibles de
connaître des défaillances, la quantité d'incontrôlé croît
avec la quantité de contrôle.
The most intelligent
big international companies at the moment are not driven by
political correctness when they try to get as many minorities on
board as possible. They have begun to understand that they
need different communities and genders working for them to
constitute the requisite variety to understand market trends and
changing tastes. After understanding comes the need for
action. This is where companies also need requisite diversity
and variety in the advertising, marketing and sales forces. |
 Why
do we need requisite variety and diversity in business and what is
requisite variety anyway ? Weick
(Social Psychology of Organizing, 1979, pp 189-193) cites Conant and
Ashby, 1970 and writes :
"The law of requisite variety 'states that the variety
within a system must be at least as great as the environmental
variety against which it is attempting to regulate itself. Put more
succinctly, only variety can regulate variety'. It's because of
requisite variety that organizations have to be preoccupied with
keeping sufficient diversity
inside the organization to sense accurately the variety present in
ecological changes outside it."
How
can we tell if sufficient requisite variety is present or absent
? Good
recent examples of a bad lack of requisite variety in companies, I
think, are the Levi-Strauss company in the U.S. and Marks and
Spencers in the U.K. The stuffy boardroom of Marks and Spencers did
not have the requisite variety to understand the ecological changes
going on in the environment (i.e. changes in middle-aged clothing
preferences,) and a Levi-Strauss management which had taken its eye
off the ball first made a structural mistake by not having the
requisite variety or diversity to understand the changes in the
jeans culture and then made a second major cultural slip-up up by
not "getting" the internet culture. Examples of where good
requisite variety has recently been available in companies I would
say "Yahoo"; Microsoft, Cisco, the Financial Times,
Wal-Mart, Intershop.
When
and where do we see international companies concerned with diversity
and requisite variety ? (Intelligent)
big international companies at the moment are no longer driven by
political correctness when they try to get as many minorities on
board as possible, they have begun to understand that they need
representatives of the different communities and genders working for
them to have the requisite variety to understand market trends and
changing tastes and then respond adequately to them.
Copyright John Gaynard, 2000-2008
For
other examples of the presence or absence of requisite variety : see
my article in French on the Mental
Models which prevent companies from making the changes necessary
for survival and thrival and my review in French of Clayton M. Christensen's The
Innovator's Dilemma, a major work which shows why some of
today's largest companies will succeed and others will fail through the presence, or
lack, of requisite variety. |