Some posts on FB told me today that today is Franz Kafka's birth anniversary (I didn't know that!)
- and thus these meanderings of times gone past...
and this post...
Many, many years back, when I was in late teens, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Fannon etc. used to be the staple diet - breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner - of life...
and then life took its own turns, and took/led me elsewhere through its own mysterious designs and destinies...
But vestiges linger, and "everything returns".. so when wrote my first book (on Organizational Design) Kafka came back.. and this is how the book started:
Chapter 1 Interpreting Organisational Reality
The (anti‑)hero of Franz Kafka’s The
Castle is a wanderer, searching for a sense of identity. His name is K, no
more than that. Wishing to escape from his lonely rootlessness, he tries
desperately to seek acceptance from the ambiguous authority structure of the
castle. But his attempts to make a meaningful contact with the authorities turn
out to be frustrating. He is unable to fathom the vagueness and ambiguity, not
to mention the stark impersonality of the echelons of the castle. Their
procedures seem arbitrary, devoid of any humane, or even meaningful, content.
At times he feels he is being unfairly treated and so responds with ineffectual
defiance. But a more common feeling is of self‑doubt, a sense of guilt, that it
must be his own fault. If there is a rule, it has to have a rationale, some
meaning, even if one finds it difficult to comprehend it. In his isolation and his inability to make a
confident response, he senses that the problem must be with him only, not with
the authorities.
He feels
indecisive, and that he must keep on trying. There must be some way of
satisfying the unclear requirements of the authorities, to behave
satisfactorily so that they will accept him. If he could only figure out the
rules, he would follow them.
In many ways, the allegory of The Castle is an
archetypal version of the contemporary individual in an organisation. Of
course, organisations are not as unpredictable as the castle. But they are
complex enough systems to create a bewildering array of inconsistent images,
and bring out our most deep‑seated anxieties, predispositions and biases. For
K, unable to comprehend how the authorities of the castle functioned, the
castle became the canvas on which his personal inferiority, his need to belong,
his loneliness could be projected; like most of us, K lived in a world of his
own making; more so, because he (again, like many of us) lacked the conceptual
options of viewing and interpreting his world in any other manner. The tragic consequence
was his loss of individuality and an abject dependence on the authorities. This
probably is the single most important reason for any practising or potential
manager to develop an insight into the organisational reality.
हमने सोचा था कि दो-चार कदम चल लेंगे
