Chapter 1: The Tree

Every organization has three groups of employees. In business language they are known as top management, middle management and junior management. However here I won’t be using those terms. An organization is like a tree and a tree can be divided into three parts. Roots, stem and leaves.

Roots refer to those employees who actually produce the product or provide the services which generates revenue for the organization. In manufacturing industry they are known as workers and in service industry they are known as billable resources. An organizations existence depends on these roots, because they are the source of revenue on which entire organization survives, still the amount of money an organization spends on each resource at this level is much lower than the people at top. We will discuss reason for this in coming chapters.

Stem, these are support staff. Their job is to take data from roots and present it to leaves in the way leaves want it to be presented. This section does not produce any product or give any services which will generate revenue for organization, still they are in the middle and not bottom because this category is the only link between Roots and Leaves. People in leaf category come up with various requirements every day. They need various data in multiple format, for “Decision making”. To what extent leaves are making really useful decisions based on this data is a matter of question, but that’s the different topic to discuss. So employees in stem category are not that important for existence of organization, but they are critical for smooth functioning of various operations of an organization.

leaves are at the top of the organization. They are known as leaders, decision makers and so on, there are so many fancy names for them. These are the people who make strategy. They would control the way an organization operates. There are several organizations producing same product and delivering same service, but still the quality of product and service is different. It’s not because of the resources an organization uses to deliver its product and service, it’s because of the way leaves operate a company. Leaves neither produce nor provide any service still they are the most important section of an organization. Their job is to manage people, both inside and outside the organization. Although people at this level do not directly get in touch with all the employees in an organization, still any decision made by them impact all or most of the employees in an organization. Leaves represents entire organization to the world. They deal with investors, government authority, competitors and all the stakeholders outside the organization. Leaves are held to be responsible for success or failure of the organization.

Roots, Stem and Leaves are all important and necessary for existence and survival of an organization, however how healthy and big a tree is dependent on it’s Leaves i.e.  The way leaves manage and run an organization, decides the fate of the organization.