Long-form notes on decision architecture, institutional clarity, and non-predictive intelligence design.
Every owner has a succession plan. It is a name, held privately, and a date that keeps moving. The company knows the name, has opinions about it, and has never been asked. That is the state of succession planning in most Indian companies with a founder still at the desk.
The values are on the wall in reception. Integrity, customer first, teamwork. The culture is what happens at 6.45pm when the owner walks past a desk and notices who is still there. The wall and the walk are different documents, and everyone in the company reads the second one.
The owner knows who is engaged. It is the people who stay late, answer on Sunday and do not argue. That definition is why the engagement survey, if the company ever runs one, will surprise him.
Every owner says he wants his people to take ownership. Then the sales manager offers a customer 8% instead of 5%, and the owner reverses it by phone in front of the customer. The team learns the real rule in one afternoon.
The company that was easy to run at fifteen people is hard to run at sixty. Nothing broke. The same people, the same product, the same owner. And every week there is a new meeting about a problem that did not exist two years ago, and the meeting produces another process, and the process produces another meeting.
There are two organisational structures in most companies between twenty and two hundred people. The one on the chart, drawn for the bank or the ISO auditor. And the one everyone actually works in, where every line leads to the owner.
The team pulls together when the owner is in the room. When he travels, it separates into the sales camp, the accounts camp and the people who came with the family. Nobody planned this. It is simply what the company does when the one thing holding it together is absent.
The owner delegates the purchase function to the new manager on a Monday. On Wednesday the manager asks whether he should go with the usual vendor. On Friday the owner is approving purchase orders again and has concluded that delegation does not work with this team. The authority went out and came back in five days.
Every owner-run company is centralised. None of them decided to be. The question Fayol asked was not whether to centralise but how much, and the honest answer in most SMEs is that nobody has ever asked.
