If you are trying to get something done, you can run into trouble if you don’t know how to organize the activity, project or company you are involved with or running.

The word organize means arranging things and actions in order to bring about what a person or group wants.

Organization is the division of various actions and duties so that they are specialized. Specialized means that specific types of actions, duties or tasks are all put in one category and other types of actions, duties or tasks are put in another category and so on.

You can organize a number of actions to take yourself. To do this, you would first see what has to be done. You would do what you could do first. Then you would continue to do the rest of the things you needed to do as you were able to.

By doing these steps, you would be able to complete what you started.

A group can be organized so that each member of that group can complete his specialized actions. These smaller actions add up to a completed final product.

A product is something completed that can be exchanged. Exchange means to give something valuable in return for something valuable. This can be any service or item. A product becomes a product when it has been delivered to someone outside the organization. Or it can be turned over to another member inside the organization.

In this way, a group can achieve its larger overall purpose—such as making or manufacturing something or delivering a service.

There is a difference between seeing that people do their jobs and doing the job yourself. Some people have trouble with this. A person in charge of an activity sometimes doesn’t know how to organize it well. So he tries to do everything by himself. If he keeps trying to do it all himself, his group will break up and fail. Why? Because all the people in the activity now have no real job or duties to do. Their jobs have been taken over by the one person in charge.

It is true that a person who is very skilled at doing something can do it better. However, he can really never do more than he can do. But a well-organized group can do many times the work only one person can do.

A person who is very skilled at doing something may become disappointed because the people working for him do not do what he expected them to do. He may then try to do it all himself instead of getting his group organized and working effectively together.

If your group is not succeeding as much as you want it to and if your people aren’t skillfully doing their jobs, you must take two steps:

1. Handle the immediate problem
2. Organize your group to handle such things and do their jobs

You can get stuck on number 1, above. If you do get stuck just trying to handle the immediate problem, you can expect to have trouble and feel overworked. This is because you have also failed to do number 2, organize your group.

So the major failure of any group is to fail to organize.

The major reason for not organizing an activity, a company, even a household, is not understanding how to organize.

For example, an executive is told he is in charge of seeing that Project X is done. He doesn’t know much about it. He has two employees who do know. The wrong thing to do is try to do Project X himself. Or to give out a lot of orders that don’t make any sense.

The right thing for this executive to do is to take the employee who knows the most about what to do and give him the other person as an assistant. Then tell them both to get to work on the project. Then the executive has to now learn more about Project X but not interfere with the employees doing the project.

Once the executive has learned more about the project, he can then see that it is done and done well. But he still lets the employees he has put on the project get it done.

If you have a project you want to get done, here is how to go about it:

Any job, no matter how small, has to be organized.

Anyone in charge of people has to be able to organize the various actions or tasks to be done and also be able to work himself and get a job done.

Failing that, a person in charge will get very little done and be badly overworked. And the rest of the group members will be wasted.

There is a subject called organization. This subject has now been made into an orderly system that can be learned. By learning it, you can succeed in what you are trying to achieve.