You know, it never ceases to amaze me how stupid people are. Last night, I was helping my mother with her homework (pointless crap in preparation for some meeting), as I often do, since she is, shall we say, not good with words.

Anyways, the really funny thing was in an article her manager made her read; I saw this, and immediately cracked up;

“For over a century the machine has been used as the model for organizations. The best organization runs like a well-oiled machine. But organizations are biological in nature, not mechanical. The root for the word ‘organization’ is ‘organism,’ not ‘machine.’ Organizations are complex ecosystems that have life within them, not Erector Set constructions.”

That’s right, the guy was seriously trying to argue that the root of ‘organization’ was ‘organism,’ not, oh, I don’t know, ‘organize,’ as you might imagine it would be.
So had he used the correct root of the word, he would have actually proved that organizations were like machines, rather than this nonsensical point he was trying to make.

I mean, we could go by a dictionary definition of machine, which is “An organized group of people whose members are or appear to be under the control of one or more leaders,” which you would think describes a corporation like K-Mart down to a tea, but you’d be wrong. It’s actually “a plant, animal, bacterium, protist, or fungus.”

It really boggles me how someone of his intellectual caliber could have possibly risen to such a high rank within the company. I mean, for the love of god, the guy actually misspelled “following” as “folk)wing.” I swear it.

I know I usually take these kinds of things out of context, but I copied everything down verbatim.