The Self-Evaluating Organization

Why don’t organizations evaluate their own activities? Why don’t they seem to manifest rudimentary self-awareness? How long can people work in organizations without discovering their objectives or determining how well they have been carried out? I started out thinking it was bad for organizations not to evaluate, and I ended up wondering why they ever do it. Evaluation and organization, it turns out, are somewhat contradictory. Failing to understand that incompatibility, we are tempted to believe in absurdities, much in the manner of mindless bureaucrats who never wonder whether they are doing useful work. If instead we asked more intelligent questions, we would neither look so foolish nor be so surprised.