The 1970s and 1980s were a period of rapid consolidation and shakeout, dominated by aquisitions, mergers, and corporate takeovers. The oddly shaped companies, stretched across time zones and cultures, that resulted from these recombinations helped fire the Reform movement, creating new structural concepts to govern these unruly entities.

By the 1990s the burst of acquisition had settled down, and these new ideas have resulted in a zodiac of new shapes for organizational architects. It was one thing for investors to swoop down and snap thjese companies up, but quite another thing for managers to make the disjointed entities work together.

Corporate restructurings were announced on an almost daily basis, many of them caused by the enormous debt loads incurred by acquiring other companies. Restructuring by itself had almost no meaning, except the sense that things were going wrong because of some geometric infelicity on the organizational chart. Inside the organization, it usually meant that someone was being punished for failure, and the punishment was to create a new job title for the next guy to fail under.

Restructuring never implied that the organization itself would change -- just the flow of command, widely held by those currently in command to be blemish-free. Too often, restructuring was the Latin form for a familiar concept, scapegoating.

Shrinkage

The most familiar reform is reduction in size. The shrinkage subtheme is a sign management has lost confidence in its ability to grow markets, sell products, and maintain central control.

The shrinkage mentality is summed up by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad as "denominator thinking." If you recall sixth grade math, you will remember a fraction has a top number (the numerator) and a bottom number (the denominator). The numerator is a company's potential for growth, expansion, core competencies, new products, new markets, generativity -- profit by doing. Whereas the denominator is various schemes for increasing the bottom line, at least on paper: cost containment, downsizing, flattening, delayering, dehiring.

Numerator companies succeed by doing terrific work and satisfying customers. Denominator companies seek to shrink a company until its current level of profits seems higher in relation to reduced costs.

Both numerator and denominator approaches are legitimate. Indeed, all companies pursue both all the time, investing resources where growth potential is apparent, and cutting costs where prospects are more modest. Shrinkage may be attempted by organizations in any mode -- Pummel, Pamper, Push, or Pull.

Given the high reliability of shrinkage, it is a wonder that so few companies simply break themselves up into separate companies and cashier the rest, as AT&T did in 1996 and as Control Data did in 1989. To do so, of course, means surrendering managerial power -- an untrod path to executive greatness.

The shrinkage strategies companies have resorted to instead have varied widely from organization to organization. The first sense that smaller was better occurred decades ago at General Motors and Dupont Chemical. In the 1920s these two huge organizations, each in turn under the management of Alfred Sloan, envisioned a greater degree of managerial flexibility by breaking a large organization into divisions. It was a good enough idea to generate a powerful competitive advantage for scores of Fortune 500 companies in the decades that followed. If you didn't decentralize in the 1960s or 70s, you just weren't trying.

But decentralization failed in its ambitions to shrink the actual size of organizations. In fact, by instituting an autonomous management tier within each division, decentralization created the very kind of bureaucratic bloat the idea was supposed to combat.

The practice suffers, too, from the tendency large corporations have of maintaining control even over autonomous divisions. IBM in the 1980s is a good example of a decentralized company whose decentralization was counterfeit -- each division was handcuffed by requirements that product releases be coordinated with other divisions, in order that IBM could get first crack at its own technologies. Net result: a tradition of delays and innovative kludginess that nearly killed "the world's most successful company." IBM was never serious about divisional empowerment.

Because decentralization is more often a dodge from greater efficiencies than a spur to them, and because it is wedded in the minds of most managers to big company empire-building, it has lost much of its currency for today's generation. The saddest commentary is that the effective company ideal modeled by Alfred Sloan in the 1920s in two generations had become the ineffective model we associate with Pamper, entitlement, and being out of touch with customers and markets. x

Demassification

The next major shrinkage solution was workgroup breakup, or demassification. Alvin Toffler coined used the phrase in Future Shock^[7] to describe an unlikely trend -- organizations and systems voluntarily reversing their trend from very large to smaller and more manageable. It was the corporate world's version of E.F. Schumacher's "Small is beautiful."

Many organizations attempt a modest degree of demassification as a move toward contained businesses-within-a-business. These would be business units or mini-companies of as many as 100 workers, containing all the functions a business requires, and charged with the mission of making money, but without decision-making autonomy. These groups often foundered because they were a sham: teams were expected to act like businesses without being given power to perform entrepreneurially -- Push without a pathway to safety.

A few organizations pursued a radical demassification model, described as a "street of shops" by M. M. Stuckey, in which the business units are even smaller, with a top size of about 50, and do have a high degree of decision-making autonomy in matters such as purchasing and training. "Street of shops" is like portfolio management in reverse: the work team must figure out ways to produce satisfactory results, or it will be cashed in.^[8]

Demassification is Push-intensive, but at least workers have their fates in their own hands. Under such succeed-or-die pressures, "street of shops" groups at Kodak, ABB, Cooper Industries and Thomas J. Lipton generally performed well. But the net effect of their independent ways was to scare top management. Break General Motors into 5,000 demassified work teams, and good things are bound to happen here and there. On the other hand, it only takes a few horror stories to draw a big company's experimental comfort zone back in. x

Flattening

Another general approach to resizing was delayering, sometimes called dehierarchization, or flattening. These structure-squashing approaches are "burning platforms," but without pathways to safety -- thus more in the realm of Pummel than Push. The idea of all of them is to collapse the traditional pyramid structure (a CEO on top, management team below, supervisory staff below that, rank and file along the bottom) into something looking more like the head of a garden rake (CEO on top, rank and file one tier below).

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The plus of this movement was to direct the maximum amount of organizational muscle toward customer satisfaction. Since, management adds no value to customers in this philosophy, there is no point in not minimizing it, and having people at the bottom manage themselves.

But workers generally know full well that "value adding" is not the real point of all this mashing down. Thinning the ranks of middle managers, dumping their salaries, and adding the burden of self-management to an already overloaded staff ("I'm not getting paid to do management's job") by is the point of much of it.

Organizations undergoing delayering need to make clear to workers, especially those sent down to the bottom tier, that de-hierarchization doesn't mean the end of the line for them. Most people find hope in the idea of promotion. Removing the hierarchy they hoped to be promoted in dampens that hope. The burden is upon the organization to create new hope, in a new dimension -- better pay, higher satisfaction, greater job enrichment. Unless this is done, the delayered organization becomes what its rake-like structure most nearly resembles -- a sweatshop. x

Downsizing

We come now to the ultimate shrinkage  initiative, downsizing and its euphemism rightsizing.^[9] No change initiative drags with it the attendant bad publicity that downsizing does. This is too bad since not all downsizing is alike. There are three classes, and only one is the evil thing the popular press depicts:

                 ƒ  Push, or catastrophic downsizing. This kind of downsizing has been with us since the dawn of time. Think of it as emergency rations. An organization loses a big contract, or it bets everything on a product that fails, or it loses its founder. The result in each case is a desperate effort to trim the company's costs -- including its payroll -- in order to survive. Analogy: the organization is lost on a raft in the Pacific, and workers must draw straws to see who will eat whom.

                 ƒ  Pull, or visionary downsizing. Without being in an immediate emergency, the organization sees that down the road, there will be greater chance for companywide success (and overall employment) by cutting away certain existing functions, divisions, product lines, and people. It is impossible to justify such cuts in the eyes of those who will feel the greatest pain, but the cuts are justified by the big picture, and the pain is balanced among constituencies -- short-term investors, employees, and even customers. A recent example is AT&T's splitting itself into three separate organizations. True, 12,000 people were laid off -- but with reasonable chances of starting over again in the new organizations. Analogy: a surgeon excises moribund tissue to save the patient. It's not anyone's dream, to learn they are nothing more to their organization than a polyp or cyst. But today's pain is prelude to tomorrow's healing.

                 ƒ  Pummel, or evil downsizing. Downsizing as short-term financial play. Downsizing as Pummel. One constituency (ownership) feels all the pleasure, while another (workers) feels all the pain. It is the downsizing we see when a company is taken over and sold off when liquidated assets are more valuable than unliquidated assets -- the people and processes in place that could yet yield long-term profitability. This view of workers holds workers as no more precious or irreplaceable as the gas that is sprayed into an engine to supply power, and allowed to dissipate.

It is pointless to urge devotees of the third class of downsizing to adopt more humane attitudes. These people are not interested in soft landings or safety nets. When they put the bite on people, their eyes roll upward like sharks'; it is in their nature to be that way.

We can hope, however, that companies pursuing the other two classes of downsizing give greater consideration to the needs of the people who are cut away from the main. Eye-contact, hugs, and outplacement services -- counseling the laid-off on how to stave off depression as they clear the wreckage of their careers from the road -- are not enough.

Workers need to know that the company's failure was the fault of management, not their own. They need to hear it come from management's own mouth: "If we had managed better, planned better, trained better, communicated better, this would not have happened. Your loss is our shame." x

Workout

Jack Welch stormed to the top of General Electric in 1980 promising a regime of continuous revolution, in which nothing was sacred and no one was safe. His goals were ambitious and culture-wrenching: all GE's businesses had be #1 or #2 in their industries, and GE itself had to grow to be the #1 company in market value -- the biggest mound on Wall Street. Until that moment GE was a classic Pamper organization, and he forced it to bend over backwards, to a hard Push.

Some would characterize GE in those days as unrelieved Pummel, , with a heavy emphasis on results. Welch borrowed the word workout to describe the lathered-up state of stress the organization is put through to change. He also used the image of a fishbowl to describe the scrutiny managers at every level were exposed to. They had to either produce or vamoose, and there was no hiding from results.

Welch was the ultimate Push manager, treating employees like puppets to be either manipulated or tossed onto the discard pile. He did not blanch at lighting a fire under people and altering their body temperatures. His early reign of terror is the textbook example of a corporate savior pulling every switch and flipping every lever to get results.^[10]

Yet Welch remains a cipher, like Quetzalcoatl, the mysterious figure who abolished human sacrifice among one group, the Toltecs, then disappeared and resurfaced among the Maya where he instituted human sacrifice. Before the decade ended Welch would re-emerge as a self-styled Pull leader, speaking of boundaryless organizations and vision-driven futures. He was like an entirely different person. But why not -- if you can change an enormous organization's culture, how hard can it be to change your own? x

     The Integration Theme

Organizations are by definition complex, made of many parts and many people. management has been ingenious at creating systems to fit people and processes together. But the more complicated systems get, the more hiding places they create. Integration gives way to fragmentation. After a while it is very difficult to see where things go wrong, where the gleaming complexity is a curtain obscuring all kinds of error and delay.

Thus we have initiatives clustered under the Integration theme , each one addressing in a different way the problems of knitting complexity back together. The best known of these is business process reengineering.

Reengineering

Reengineering is a way of re-thinking the way businesses work -- green-grass thinking that is unafraid to jettison the tried and true in search of greater efficiencies. The official definition goes like this: "Business reengineering is the process of fundamentally changing the way work is performed in order to achieve radical performance improvements in speed, cost, quality, market share, and return on investment." A reengineered definition might describe it simply as "a fresh look."

Reengineering is an open-ended regimen. It invites you to search for an answer ("What's the very best way to run your organization?") when there is no preconceived right answer, and no cookie-cutter methodology for finding a right answer. It asks you to imagine, using your best powers of imagination, a quantum leap forward in performance.

Given this open-endedness, it is not surprising that many reengineering efforts are failures. The ideas of reengineering are too often implemented incorrectly, at enormous financial and emotional cost to the organization. Hammer and Champy concede that 70% of reengineering efforts fail to achieve any results. There are several reasons for this difficulty -- most stem from the organization's unwillingness to go far enough to:

                 ƒ  Ready the wrecking ball. The first order of repair is often demolition. To build an organization up, we must first tear it down. To solve a problem, we must first erase our wrong answers so that we may begin with "a clean sheet of paper."

                 ƒ  Compress your workforce horizontally. I.e., combine jobs. Reengineered processes move away from the assembly line concept -- there is no longer a long chain of individuals, each involved in a single task. Individuals are responsible for processes, such as "customer service," not unitary tasks like "answers phones" or "handles complaints." This consolidation or compression is horizontal in nature -- one person bow doing the tasks that several did before.

                 ƒ  Compress the workforce vertically. Compression can be up-and-down as well: workers can take on the tasks of their supervisors, monitoring and managing themselves.

                 ƒ  Let work find its natural path. Once expressed as part of an organization's flow chart, processes calcify into needless "linearization." Flow charts should not take the place of common sense and must never preclude innovation. Confused about the natural sequence of steps in a process?

                 ƒ  Enlist technology as partner. Not technology as automation, simply speeding up the same old tasks, but technology that brings the possible into clearer focus. Hammer, an information technology specialist, devotes an important chapter to use computers and telecommunications advances -- machines -- as the enablers of new visions.

                 ƒ  Overcome resistance. Most reengineering efforts fail not because the points of change are poorly designed but because they are poorly communicated. Reengineering should be seen not as a value-neutral proposal but as a war to be fought with propaganda and persistence.

                 ƒ  Discard half-measures. Too many managers opt for the safe compromise, the hybrid that melds the old with the new. Hammer emphatically rejects the idea of "just fixing things." The main reengineering efforts fail is because they aren't reengineering at all -- just quick fixes in drag. What is called for he says, is a new kind of discontinuous thinking that identifies and abandons outdated rules and assumptions.

                 ƒ  Allow executive evolution. The CEO as scorekeeper and punisher/rewarder must give way to one that leads.

                 ƒ  Forget about "standardization." Big companies have become slave to the top-down, one-size-must-fit-all mentality. Reengineered processes vary from application to application. Massive downward-dictated standards are an organizational ego-trip. Let standards percolate upward, from the pockets of actual expertise.

                 ƒ  Reengineer the right processes. The most obvious candidates will be those obviously in trouble, suffering frequent breakdowns. Beyond these, look for processes in which there are many handoffs, reweighings, rework and repetition; bloated and costly inventories and protective buffers; a high degree of cross-checking, and a low degree of value-adding; and processes that seem swamped by their own complexity, and the high number of exceptions and "special cases" to be dealt with.

                 ƒ  Clear away clutter. The modern corporation is a tinker-toy monstrosity of checks, balances, and reconciliations. All that must be stricken down, and a fresh, clean beginning made amid the rubble. Having work pass through so many hands and lie fallow in so many in-baskets is like watching a pig pass through a snake. Reengineering efforts which fail to straighten out this clutter miss the whole point of reengineering.

As you grapple with the challenge of creating a new organization on the site of the old one, consider these suggestions:

                              ‚  Before you obliterate, educate. Obviously, a solution which calls for ten to do the work of twenty or thirty requires a different kind of workforce. It's easy to say "Hire better -- hire flexible self-starting generalists with good communications and decision-making skills, judgment, wisdom, maturity, education, and talent. " Business and society must become more serious about education.

                              ‚  Think "case manager." That's Hammer's concept of the new role of the reengineered worker -- a competent, empowered, versatile, informed person who serves as custodian of a problem through to its solution.

                              ‚  Find a reason to believe. Workers aren't puppets. You can't put them through a million motions without giving them a reason why. Reengineering rises or falls on the new values and beliefs it engenders. A primary task of management is to communicate these values and beliefs -- honestly, clearly, and often.

                              ‚  Don't try to do too much. Process redesign requires sharp focus and enormous discipline. Attempting to do it companywide, all at once, is like trying to tackle a dinosaur.

                              ‚  Or settle for too little. There is a temptation, when your company is in mid-upheaval, to celebrate too soon, and call a few minor improvements a success. Don't succumb -- big results require big ambitions. Indeed, Hammer says, incremental improvements can be hazardous to your company's health. Instead of simplifying, they add to the lacework of the organization's existing structure. Most pernicious of all, glorifying "the little things" creates a culture of smallthink, and a company with no valor and no courage.

Hammer believes that by empowering workers to find their own ways to add value to customers, they will rise to unparalleled levels of compensation. You may spend your entire career as nothing more than a "case manager," but you may earn a salary in the high six figures. Those who excel will rise; those who are average will quickly plateau; and those who are not up to the vision, or lack the skills, will be toast.

The question is, is this really happening anywhere? Workers at organizations undergoing major change initiatives move heaven and earth to become more customer-conscious, with an eye toward this promised land of higher salaries. To our eyes, most people, whether they are peak performers or average performers, are making the same pay they made in pre-reengineering days.

Workers are either a) delivering uncompensated value but keeping their jobs or b) losing their jobs. For the former group, it's a sped-up world, fraught with tons of accountability (Push) but little perceivable payback (Pull). For the latter group, any distinction between reengineering and downsizing is niggling, because brother, they're gone. x

You have to feel a little sorry for Michael Hammer, co-author of the book that set the reengineering craze in motion, Reengineering the Corporation.^[11] He is a great success who is associated in many people's minds with great failure.

Reengineering is the only major change initiative that can be identified with a single person. William Edwards Deming may be "Mr. Quality" to his devotees, but no one attributes all the good or all the bad done in the name of quality to him. Hammer, an exuberant self-promoter, has not been so lucky

Reengineering has been the biggest change initiative of the 1990s (assuming TQM and teams are seen as creatures of the previous decade). Because Hammer and Champy sold a quarter million copies of the book, they -- especially Hammer, who typifies the metamaniac  personality type-- came to be seen as the owners of the idea. This occurred despite forty other books on business process reengineering by Hammer-Champy wannabes and an army of independent consultants, all presenting their own versions of reengineering.

This may explain the defensive tone of his recent work. His three books all include lengthy sections of explanation  for reengineering efforts gone awry. Even Champy introduced his followup book, Reengineering Management, with the sentence, "Reengineering is in trouble." x

Speedup

Improving cycle time could fall into either the Process or Results themes. It is process reengineering that focuses exclusively on time, and it is the direct ancestor of the time-motion studies of the 1920s. Improving cycle time requires that a continuous voice be whispering in your head, "How long does this activity take? Can you find a way to do it quicker?"

Shortening cycle times -- how long it takes to develop a product, to test it, to manufacture it, to roll it out to market -- can be a major strategic advantage. For certain products and services, such as package delivery or food preparation, short cycle time is synonymous with quality. The reverse is also true: improve quality by eliminating defects, and your cycle can't help but speed up.

But there is a downside to improving cycle times, and Peter Senge nails it:

What has concerned me is not the logic but the implementation of the logic. In particular, I believed American corporations, ever in search of the 'quick fix,' would see this as the ultimate bromide. By trying to 'speed up,' we would simply take one more step in a long-term trend of shortening time horizons, discounting the past, and living for the moment.^[12]

Overstretched workers are stretched a little more, he said. Managers distracted by crisis after crisis will find even less time for reflection and planning.

Cycle time improvement must be more than just a Chinese fire drill, in which people are made to perform tasks more and more quickly. The Push for measurable improvement Stress must be balanced with the Pull of engaged sympathies: "Faster delivery means greater security."

Companies achieving shorter cycle times through simple fiat -- demanding faster results from people without giving them the means to do so on a sustainable basis or a vision of long-term livability -- soon have an organization with its motor racing and its heart about to explode. x

Value Disciplines

Value is like looking at quality through a wide-angle lens. Instead of a close-up of a satisfied customer, it shows us the bigger picture of what it may take to put that smile on the customer's face. It broadens the definition of customer satisfaction and allows an organization to see the consequences of all its processes in one neat frame.

The value crusade underway today got a big push from a book by Michael Treacy and Fred Weirsema published in 1995, The Discipline of Market Leaders.^[13] It declared that today's vital companies are those that are attuned to the idea of delivering some kind of value; and that today's moribund companies are those that have lost their way, whose outlook, business traditions, and fixed assets prevent them from delivering "the best deal anywhere."

Future success belongs to organizations that commit to being value leaders in their markets, companies unwilling to settle for parity level performance.

There are only three strategic approaches, called value disciplines, that lead to value leadership. 

                 ƒ  The first value discipline is product leadership. It applies to companies who endeavor to sell products that deliver the best results to customers. Quality hardware, and an intense focus on product deveelopement are the hallmarks of this kind of company. Examples: Procter & Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Walt Disney, Intel, Thomas Edison's laboratories in its heyday.

                 ƒ  The second value discipline is operational excellence. It applies to companies thast deliver a combination of high reliability, low price, and hassle-free convenience -- Treacy calls this "total cost" -- that competitors cannot match. Examples: McDonalds, Price/Costco, Wal-Mart, Dell Computer, and Ford Motor in the days of Henry Ford.

                 ƒ  The third value discipline is customer intimacy. It applies to companies that offer their customers the best total solution: consultation, individual service, guaranteed products. Price aside, these are companies you cannot lose with. Examples, Nordstrom, Roadway Logistics, Johnson Controls, IBM in its heyday,

A value leader must commit to being the best in its market at one of these disciplines, and to achieving parity performance with the other. Because they are in tension, one cannot commit to excellence in all three. But you have to be best in your class in at least one, and "good enough" in the other two.

Reengineering efforts are organized to a large degree around the value concept -- pulling people away from non-value-adding functions and putting them where they have direct impact on the value proposition. So organizations caught up in defining what approach they will take to deliver value to customers go through the same headaches as companies gutting their process map.

Companies founder when their strategies don't match up well with the people they have working for them. A company that figures out what its key value discipline is has to rummage through all its processes and policies, rooting out those that are not in alignment with the new regime.

This search-and-destroy mission is not limited to things; it also extends to people. Few employees -- a handful of Amiables and Analyticals -- are suited to work interchangeably in all three of the value philosophies:

                 ƒ  Product leader companies like 3M and Intel employ workers with extraordinarily high levels of knowledge, and are given a corresponding high degree of autonomy. Workers are like aristocrats; because they are highly self-motivated, the atmosphere is a powerful Pull.

                 ƒ  Customer intimacy companies like New York's Plaza Hotel have a Push and Pull orientation, featuring high compensation for individuals who can delivering quality to individual customers, and intolerance of anything less. Workers function on a level of shopkeepers, proud of their skills and alert to customer needs.

                 ƒ  Operationally excellent companies like Taco Bell, which has stopped preparing food, and is now just assembling ingredients supplied by vendors, are Push all the way -- low wages, low skills, lots of rules. Workers are treated as peasants, who perform best when their work is least distinguishable from the next person's.

When value change initiatives falter, it is often because the existing workforce includes people who would enjoy greater success in one of the other two disciplines. x

These three parables are variations on three famous business anecdotes: the employee who is handsomely rewarded for making a mistake, the frogs who allow themselves to boil to death so lonf as the heat is increased slowly, and the associate who goes to heroic lengths to assure customer satisfaction. We changed them from their inspiring original versions to better reflect everyday reality.

A young associate at an investment bank had been empowered to make decisions that he felt would increase customer satisfaction. One day he sensed that a client's assets could perform better in the futures market, moved $3 million into it, lost the entire amount in less than a week. When the client sued and was awarded the full $3 million, the associate was called to the senior partner's office.

"I guess you figure you just spent $3 million educating me, huh?"

"Security, this is Mr. Honeywell. Will you get up here on the double?"

*

Every night in the executive suites of transnational corporations, CEOs are heating up pots of water with frogs inside, to see if the fampus story is true. But when the water starts getting to warm, the frogs jump out.

*

John, a clerk at a well-known department store, noticed that a customer he had never seen before had accidentally dropped a dollar bill. Before he could return it, the customer had left the area. John consulted the credit slip and determined that she was on vacation from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and that she was booked for a flight home in less than an hour. He debated leaving work, driving to the airport, and if necessary, booking a flight to Baraboo to return the dollar. Then he caught himself and said, "What am I thinking? It's only a dollar." x

     The Improvement Theme

The Improvement theme holds that the challenge of every organization is to keep getting better -- forever. The theme has its roots in the ideas of Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, who fashioned a new and, for the time, an idealistic internal vision of productivity and specialization in the 1920s.

Quality

In the modern era improvement has meant a focus on boosting quality in products and services. During World War II poor manufacturing quality cost many American lives, and a new generation of engineers and statisticians applied their talents to ensuring reliability in the factory.

Out of this effort grew the idea of inspector-based quality control and, in time, the more preventive, more proactive approaches of quality assurance. It was during the postwar occupation of Japan that William Edwards Deming shared his ideas of industrial quality improvement with leaders of a devastated Japanese industrial base, and laid the foundation not just for a revivified Japan but a new way of thinking about organizations.

This new way was half-American and half-Japanese. It reached its full flower in the discipline of continuous improvement, or kaizen, and its broadest definition in the practice of total quality management, or TQM. But Americans probably first heard about the way of thinking in the context of quality circles.

Quality circles were the breakthrough fad of the 1980s, and they spelled out a pattern that all too many change initiatives would duplicate in the months and years that followed. The idea was that workers would meet formally and propose changes to an organization's quality system. This way people at the shop floor level would have a voice in critiquing and improving the organization.

Quality circles continued to work well in Japan, where a culture of respect compels organizations to hear employees out once they are invited to speak. In the United States, however, there is no such tradition of respect; here, we feel freer to disregard inputs we don't like. Quality circles had no power except the power to propose. Inevitably, a circle would critique something that a higher-up deemed to be beyond reproach -- something embarrassing to a manager, or something that cost money , or something that diminished a boss's power -- and the circle would be hung out to dry.

Quality circles were a Pull mechanism that, transplanted to the United states, were expected to function in a Push environment. They caught on as a fad, but were unable to survive in the hostile working environment. . Of the many thousands of quality circles formed in the early 1980s, it is estimated that 75 percent were extinct within four years.^[14] x

TQM

When quality returned to the American forefront, it came back roaring. Quality circles had been like bicycles, meek and underpowered. Total Quality management came on like an American car, ambitious, wide, with tons of features, chrome, and customability.

The main things TQM had that quality circles lacked were involvement, empowerment, and feedback. TQM aimed to touch every improvement base. It would look to improve an organization's leadership; its relationships with customers, partners and suppliers; it would expect a new attitude about topics never before tied to quality -- data management, training, employee involvement. It was called total quality management because its scope spared nothing.

TQM today is a mall of change initiatives, a theme-park-within-a-theme-park. It is a nexus for over a dozen revolutionary management themes, including improved worker relations (employee participation), improved communication (feedback loops), improved processes, improved measurement, and above all, a deeper relationship with customers. It is the philosophy undergirding the Baldrige Award.

In application, TQM can be a modest, one-focus-at-a-time program, or it can be a fire-every-gun-at-once overhaul of the entire organization. It succeeds best when its many tentacles are guided by a central principle. Customer satisfaction is the principle most often supplied, but it is possible to fashion a TQM program based on other visions: the drive to innovate, to entertain, to strengthen a cause, to provide long-term employment and profits.

TQM seldom goes 100 percent awry because there are so many facets of it, several are sure to yield results. But complaints about comprehensive quality improvement programs are very common. Usually they arise because of the brand of TQM that is being implemented.

                 ƒ  too broad. Attacking everything at once is usually a recipe for exhausted confusion, but that is the approach most companies adopt with TQM. Wise organizations assign pilot teams to make mistakes on a small-scale, and roll out the program to other units along with the lessons learned in the pilot stage.

                 ƒ  too narrow. Companies that adopt off-the-shelf quality solutions, imitating what they read about another company, or that put all their eggs in the ISO 9000 or Baldrige assessment basket, violate the first law of continuous improvement -- open-mindedness to change opportunities. Deming warned that organizations need to craft quality regimens out of their own knowledge and experience -- not what we read in a magazine.too rushed. Doing TQM the way it cries out to be done is like adding a second full-time job to the one you already have. Many companies have implemented a companywide TQM effort only to cut it back later when it proved too distracting and too demoralizing to workers.Florida Power & Light won the Deming Award in 1988, and immediately abbreviated their TQM program to one they could manage.

                 ƒ  too expensive. Large corporations have spent tens of millions on TQM measurements, paradoxically without measuring whether the money was well-spent. The $64,000 question is still, after 20 years of experience, does higher quality reap higher profits?

                 ƒ  too bureaucratic. Quality has been stretched to include every imaginable dimension of product and service success, but it has not been extended to include the corporation itself. Thus many of the companies we associate with highest quality are often the very kind of bloated Pamper organizations . Quality in products and services is not their problem; quality in operational efficiency is.

If there is a single moment when most quality programs go wrong, it is the moment of deployment, when an organization of some size hands the TQM package over to its workforce. Leaders who had shepherded the program from its inception to the formulation of fine details have a bad habit of stepping back from the action at this point, perhaps hoping the newly empowered workforce will figure everything out by itself.That never happens. Leadership is never as necessary as at this moment of handoff. Not only must the champions and sponsors of the quality effort show their support -- including the topmost levels of management -- but they must hang in there as teachers and coaches, even as the "official" trainers go to work.

Finally, give some thought to differences among workers. The generic two-day quality training course may be appropriate for the heart of the workforce -- the people who can be relied on to respond affirmatively to the Push/Pull of a new challenge.

But there will be people at the far end of the scales that will require special attention. The metaphiles will be like rabbits, wanting to get started without delay. If you were smart, you enlisted their help during the pilot stages. These are the people who can fall on their faces and get up laughing -- the perfect people to launch a new idea.

At the other end of the scale will be the people who will likely show the greatest resistance, the metamorons that keep the old system humming, and are likely to balk at the new. These people will need more work, more reassurance, and more time to get with the new regime. x

 

 

When William Edwards Deming died at age 94 in 1993, he was the most respected figure in the history of organizational thought. But as much as he enjoyed in life telling companies when they were wrong, so would he be dismayed at companies who have simplistically implemented his "14 Points of Management." Deming did not suffer fools lightly, and he abhorred seeing his life of rigorous thinking reduced to a cheat-sheet. There are many stories of him upbraiding quality professionals for taking his 14 Points too literally.^[15]

He said that each organization, once it possessed profound knowledge, should come up with its own version of the 14 points. As an exercise in perversity, consider each of his 14 Points, and imagine how each has been routinely misunderstood, imperfectly understood, understood out of context, and downright botched:

1. "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service."  Adopt a single point of view and close the book on new thinking.

2. "Adopt the new philosophy."  Trash all that went before and create afresh.

3. "Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality."
Stop looking for mistakes.

4. "End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag."
Form sweetheart unions with key suppliers.

5. "Improve constantly.."
Focus entirely on improving processes, turning a blind eye to whether what is being improved matters to customers.

6. "Institute training on the job."
Do only on-the-job training.

7. "Institute leadership."
Replace managerial acumen with charismatic posturing.

8. "Drive out fear"
Pamper people.

9. "Break down barriers between departments."
Weaken functions.

10. "Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets ."
Eliminate encouragement and recognition.

11. "Eliminate quotas. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals.."
Eliminate standards. Eliminate objectives. Eliminate arithmetic.

12. "Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship."
Ignore deadlines and cost overruns.

13. "Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement."
Emphasize learning over doing.

14. "The transformation is everybody's job."^[16]

Compulsory drills at dawn.. x

 

 

 

     The Direction Theme

The saddest reason for change failures is that it was the wrong change. It is always disheartening to discover, long after you have stopped shaking, that your organization didn't need electroshock treatment. It was a misread, or a mislead. The direction theme is about leadership and vision, the two characteristics pointing organizations in the direction they are going to go galloping off in, giving them that final slap on the hindquarters.  We place this theme in the center of the Changeland continuum because no change initiative can succeed without both of these. Organizations aren't like lone scientists, laboring in a lab. They can't "get lucky." They do what they do because someone has an idea and knows how to stand at the levers of Push and Pull to make that idea a reality.

Leadership

There is too much to say about the new passion for leadership. We included a lengthy chapter in Why Teams Don't Work about how leaders come up short. We refer newcomers to the topic to that book. There are no newcomers to the topic, of course, because everyone has thought about leadership and its importance to making change happen. It is the catalyst for nearly all change; without it, even bad change doesn't happen.

 

The craze surrounding leadership is the most curious development of the Aquarian era of organizational thinking. The traditional meaning of the word summons up manly images of generals on horseback, swords skyward. But the new movement of leadership has gone in almost the opposite direction: toward a vision of the leader as emotionally in tune with others, a nurturer of ideas and aspirations, a sharer of information, a teacher, a helpmeet, a friend.

These descriptives go against the male ideal. The "feminization" of leadership is an idea no one seems to want to take credit for, but that is clearly what it is: a role reaching out to that side of the human personality which least been asked to, or allowed to, lead. There is tremendous merit in the idea of managers, male and female, allowing the developing of this other side. It allows leaders to think of themselves more as motivators, as culture-makers, and providers of pathways out of the macho excesses that have "led" so many organizations to the brink.

That is what is happening in the leadership movement today. The previous generation's leaders were gladiators and whiz-kids, MacArthurs and MacNamaras. New Age leaders, by contrast, are agents of visionary kindness. They are facilitators, map-makers, coaches.

This development fits with the Push/Pull split. Organizations that have tried using traditionally masculine coercion techniques are seeing the wisdom of bringing out the best in individuals, whatever that may be. Stereotypically, it has been the father that wants his son to be just like him, to do what he says. As the son reaches maturity, the father expects the son to become "a man," and be suddenly good at leading, after a lifetime of following. Stereotypically, it is the mother who raises her children, teaches principles, and allows the children to become what is in them.

 

There are other leadership paradoxes. One of the strangest is seeing people lining up and paying money to learn how to become leaders. Another, embedded inside that one, is that the leadership experts appear to prefer describing it to providing it.

In recent years we have created a very false dichotomy between management, which is held out as bad and mechanistic and cold, and this new thing, leadership, which is in all ways good and transformative and noble. This dichotomy is unfortunate for management, which is still critical to the success of any initiative, and to leadership itself, which is in danger of being apotheosized out of existence, made too heroic for ordinary business people to do.

Though it is one of the pleasures of being American to hold our leaders up to ridicule, there really is something substantive called leadership, and that without it the democratic organization, no matter how empowered its people are, and no matter how participative its processes are, is in deep weeds. We need leaders to keep us on point, to lead. And we need them to give us a point or vision to be on.

Leadership must be real to matter. Recent literature (and ancient literature, going back to Tao) suggests  that the modern leader should be a servant to those who follow, and that the leader should forswear privilege and eat with the masses and park far from the front door like everyone else. The new leader should be a counselor, an easer of friction ("facilitator"), a friend.

That kind of presence in an organization must indeed be wonderful, but it sounds more like Mr. Chips than the kinds of bosses most of us have had.  Is it likely that busy important people will have time for everyone? Is it natural for underlings to seek out the counsel of people who have the power of life and death over them? How many of us trust the facilitating skills of someone is better known for keeping our entrails tied in a permanent knot of stress, worry and fear?

To put it another way, how many of us have friends who make 60 times more money than we make?

When we turn away from the leadership literature and toward the world of real leadership, the contradictions overwhelm us. For every leader plying Push and Pull to elicit best efforts for a common cause, there are a dozen who are obviously only in it for themselves.

In the current scheme of things, the leader is less often a servant than someone who loots a failing company of its precious resources before parachuting himself to safety.

The burden of leadership reform should be on leaders. Let them forswear stock purchase plans. Forsake the executive eject button. If earnings come up short, do as Jim Renier, CEO of Honeywell, did, and give some back. Pay back a little more each time your managerial wizardry is unable to keep a valuable employee employed.

They may say, that isn't how the market works. CEOs are swapped like baseball cards, the compensation levels quickly reaching sky-high levels -- 60 times the average worker salary, or 100. You didn't create this crazy system.

If you're a leader, then lead. You don't Pull by words, you Pull by example. So long as leadership maintains its imperial, feudal ways -- "Do what I say, don't do what I do" -- efforts to empower and involve and collaborate ring false. x

 

Mission and Vision

Like chickens and eggs, it can de debated which is more important, leadership or vision. One view is that leadership is enough by itself -- that charisma or personal energy in lieu of an enduring vision, can keep an organization vital. It is a uniquely American idea, that a genius leader, a Bill Gates or Walt Disney or Warren Buffett can take the place of a coherent strategy.

The other is that leadership is merely a delivery mechanism for vision. The vision itself is what sustains and keeps an unwieldy organization stumbling on through difficulty and discord. The long-term goal is the one thing that everyone knows about and understands, and that can be used to break short-term logjams. It is the trump that can momentarily unite fractured groups and salve over open organizational wounds. It is the essence of the Pull part of change -- the idea that draws people together to work.

Where organizations go wrong is assuming that the vision is this precious grail-like object that only the organizational priests are privy to -- that it appears in a dream to the executive team, who then hold it up high for the rank and file to ooh and ahh over.

To this end, vision-and-mission consultants will often take the management team aside for several consecutive weekends, sequester them at some thought-provoking inspiring, high location in the Rockies, Sierra Madres or Adirondacks -- visioning evidently occurs best at altitudes frequented by eagles -- and they hold hands, seance-style, until the vision announces itself.

The problem with the priestly approach to vision-and-mission is that the resulting vision is often a lot of portentous crap. The outcome, instead of being a useful reminder to keep to the change track, is a paragraph held to be so sacred that no one dares change it.

Fairly humming with exalted intentions, the paragraph of most visions or mission statements lead off with:. "We are committed to ...

                 ƒ  "industry leadership..."

                 ƒ  "world-class process management..."

                 ƒ  "an unsurpassed commitment to customer satisfaction..."

                 ƒ  "next-century technology..."

                 ƒ  unshakable integrity in all our dealings."

This is not communication, but a bouquet of superlatives, a kind of corporate mantra to mutter as the organization tiptoes past the graveyard of change. Since the words have been officially sanctified, the words are what people pay attention to, and not the meaning. Of course, since the words are vague and mushy, there is not a lot of attachable meaning.

This is not to say that the mission-and-vision process is useless. Great companies have focused on vision with great success. But they started doing so thirty years before it became the blue plate special at the consulting cafeteria. And they focused not on the vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation of the eventual statement, but on homely, down-to-earth goals:

                 ƒ  "We will be first or second in every market we sell to.... "

                 ƒ  "We will focus our own research on applications, while focusing outside investment on technologies that may not bear fruit for years.... "

                 ƒ  "We will refuse payment for any job our customers are unhappy with, no matter the reason.... "

                 ƒ  "We will promote from within, and train associates in new skills...."

James Collins in Built to Last observes that most organizations spend most of their strategic thinking time writing the “vision statement,” with a little time beforehand to discuss the topic, and a shallow effort afterward to communicate the message down through the ranks and out to the world.

The proportions are all wrong, Collins said. Zero time should be spent on writing down what the core values and core purposes are. “Wordsmithing” is a pointless exercise if the meaning underlying the statement is fluff, or if it will never be put to the test of reality. What percentage of time should be spent on fixing the system so the values cannot be ignored? Try 80 percent.^[17]

A proper vision may make mention of market penetration or improved cycle times, but its roots go deeper. They extend all the way to the first questions a business must ask: Why are we doing this? What is the point of all this toil? What's it all about?

Is it just money? Making money, purely, solely, and totally, is the legitimate driving vision for results-driven investment vessels like Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Such companies have no operations, they are purely financial entities, and their shareholder constituency far outweighs their other constituencies -- the handful of employees such companies employ, the communities in which they do business. It could be argued that they do not really do "business," because they are never "busy."

Most companies, however, are rooted in the more concrete world of making products and performing services, and their visions must answer a philosophical question: Do we want to make a difference in the lives of the constituencies we serve?

The vision process has humbled every organization that came to it with honest intentions. It casts a cold light on a company's performance, and the compromises we all make to meet short-term obligations. But those who come wanting to make their organizations matter more to the constituencies they serve, it provides a powerful Pull that can keep hope alive, over the course of many years. x

     The Character Theme

A characteristic of many change initiatives is the creation of a "second bottom line" or reason for the corporation's existence. Thus zero defects could be asserted as a primary corporate goal, alongside net profits; or insuperable customer satisfaction; or the provision of steady employment -- whatever the chairman and board decide is as important as quarterly profits.

The second bottom line of a principle-centered organization is virtue. Doing good while doing well, is the motto of the character crowd. A good company is honest and above-board in its dealings; hews to strict ethical guidelines on corporate and individual behavior; acts only in consonance with its convictions; is fair to employees and suppliers and considerate of the community it does business in.

While not usually a corporate initiative, character, or organizational ethics, is an important theme of New Age management. It shows up in the Baldrige Award criteria, slightly veiled, as the "Public Responsibility and Corporate Citizenship" category. It is a modeling system that begins in the leadership, and over time, as ancient suspicions are put to rout by decency and justice, infuses the entire organization, and goes on to make the marketplace itself an incrementally more moral place.

It is the organizational equivalent of "acts of random kindness," which hold that good deeds encourage more good deeds. . An ethically oriented organization cleans up its little corner of the world with right action. Other organizations do the same with their corners. Right action stimulates and models still more right action. Soon the entire world is transformed, corporate raiders start saying "mother, may I" before they pounce, the sun comes out and the birds sing.

Increasing the amount of decent behavior in the business world is all to the good. But making righteousness a "second bottom line" can lead to unforeseen problems. In the first place, there is really no such thing as "organizational morality." Organizations are not people, and do not have free will, not even when the individuals in the organization are wholly empowered.

Leaders are necessarily political creatures, balancers of many interests. Their job is to choose what is best for the most people over the most significant time period. This is less an ethical situation -- choosing the binary right thing -- than a Machiavellian situation of finding the lesser of evils in a rainbow of grays. "Good" leaders still administer predictable doses of pain to people, families and communities, just as "good" generals must still send soldiers to their deaths. Morally indelicate decisions come with the job of seeking the common good for the largest number.

The most authentic corporate character may be the ethical conduct of its leaders, not as leaders but as human beings. Though there cannot really be such a thing as a "good organization," an organization where people act like good people -- where they are allowed to, never mind being encouraged to --  is the next best thing. x

The Relationship Theme

The metaphor of the Industrial Age was the gear. The machines people operated were gears, and so were the people operating them. Squirt a little oil on our teeth from time to time, and presumably we would remain in good working order.

In the New Age, we're not gears any more, and the machine itself is now seen as a living organism composed of many interdependent living cells, all different, needing not oil but sustenance, community, and meaning. The Relationship theme is an umbrella over a handful of initiatives that acknowledge this new insight. Their emphasis is on understanding and strengthening the membranes between these living cells.

The significance of the Relationship theme is that introducing the human factor to the managerial task greatly expands the role of managers -- it means managers must be different kinds of people than a generation ago. The weakness of the theme is that, because it is about people and their passions, it is susceptible to passing fashions.

Theories X and Y

These were theories of the 1950s that spun out of the first realizations that there was something important missing in the existing and very successful manufacturing model. The image that comes down to us is of Charlie Chaplin being pulled through the giant gearmill in Modern Times, then becoming a kind of machine himself, treating every challenge he encountered as a bolt needing tightening.

Douglas McGregor, the godfather of humanistic management, fired the first volley of the New Age in a 1960 book called The Human Side of the Enterprise.^[18] First he described what he saw as the status quo, an essentially mechanistic model combining the principles of scientific management and the metaphor of the assembly line. McGregor called this model Theory X. In Theory X:

                 ƒ  Workers dislike and avoid work;

                 ƒ  Supervisors must threaten punishment;

                 ƒ  Workers avoid responsibility and seek direction.

In it, managers are the repository of all important information. They and only they know what's best for the organization. Rank and file workers are essentially children, driven only by their own concerns and oblivious to the organization's needs. Any system attempting to shift the responsibility for organizational vision from management to the total workforce is therefore doomed to failure.

In McGregor's counterproposal, Theory Y:

                 ƒ  Workers want to find job satisfaction;

                 ƒ  Greatest results come from willing participation;

                 ƒ  Workers seek opportunity for involvement and self-respect.

The heart of Theory Y is that workers are not children, that they often care about the organizations they are a part of, and this concern ought to be harnessed through proper motivation and a more humane workplace, for the corporate good. Treat people better, McGregor said, and you will see productivity that makes the existing order of button-pushing and results-demanding pale.

Theory Y was a warning shot, a message to the old ways that the days of Pummel were numbered. . McGregor's humane ideas made him a savior to a generation of young managers. There was a great rush at better companies to show that the management had a new attitude toward workers and a new paradigm for control. There were a few showcase Theory Y companies that one could point to as examples of the new thinking -- IBM, S.C. Johnson, Pan Am.

In a way, Theory Y is a blueprint for the management revolution that followed -- how to redefine control, from buttons to be pushed by management, to a healthy productive system that generated its own rewards and motivation.

It quickly became readily apparent to everyone trying to leverage change that while Theory Y was powerful on paper, Theory X was more powerful on the shop floor. Trying to reconcile the two visions, McGregor took another step at utopia with Theory Z, which embodied elements of both tight centralized and loose decentralized control -- roughly analogous to our yoking together of Push (control) and Pull (autonomy).

But the world of managerial thought was picking up speed. Ken Blanchard ("One-Minute Managing") and Tom Peters ("management by wandering around") were just around the corner, with simple fads that would co-opt the humane principles of McGregor, and make a sleepy publishing category, business books, a best-selling phenomenon.

The New Age gathered steam so quickly that no one mentioned to William Ouchi, who wrote a book two years later with the title Theory Z, an examination of Japanese organizational ideas that worked just as well in the U.S., that the name had already been taken. x

There is a balloon game every child has played. It is too simple to have a name. The idea is simply to keep a falling balloon in the air, no matter what, without actually holding it in your hands. You can bump it with your fingertips, fists, forehead or nose.

It's great for young kids because the balloon moves slowly, and it takes neither speed nor muscle to keep the balloon in the air for several minutes at a time. And oh yes, the penalty for letting it touch the ground is the destruction of the universe.

That game is a lot like the life-cycle of a business idea, how it comes into being and gradually infiltrates the organizational world. It usually begins with a elegant new metaphor, a new way of looking at structure, process, or strategy.

The taut new idea is then set aloft by its creator to make its way through the atmosphere. As it descends, the first tier of clever people, mostly consultants, seize on it as if it were theirs, codify it, simplify it, rename it as something of their own. The game is now on, as the next tier of players, managers, bump the idea up as long as they can, using heads, elbows, and heinies.

Eventually the laws of physics and of organizations intervene. Either the once taut idea loses its surface tension and deflates by itself, or the idea comes into contact with something sharp, like an astute criticism, or worst of all, it touches the ground, the universe is not destroyed, and everyone playing realizes the idea was never magical to begin with.

When too many balloons touch the ground, the creator -- the person who put the idea into play, usually the CEO -- deflates, loses credibility. New ideas must then come from another source, a new leader or an outside advisor who can pump new helium into the organization. And the process begins anew. x

One Minute Managing

One Minute Managing is one of the grandaddies of change fads. A good alternate name for it might be "Son of Theory Y," for it sprung from the intuition Douglas McGregor had, that great things were possible if organizations would start treating people more like human beings and less like rats in mazes.

The One Minute idea appeared in a series of very brief, very readable best-selling (7 million sold) books by Kenneth Blanchard and a series of co-authors in the early 1980s. The core idea was that managing people -- the core task of managers -- wasn't as hard as all the managerial systems being taught in business school suggested. What managers needed to do, Blanchard suggested, was to forget about the "systems" and start paying attention to people as individuals, at least for one minute.

The blinding insight of The One Minute Manager was that managers could perform the three primary tasks of management in minute-long installments.^[19] Individual goals could be set, and individual persons could be praised or reprimanded in a minute. More than a minute was more than most individuals were willing to hear; on the other hand, a minute was 60 seconds more attention than most people were getting from their bosses.

That this idea struck people as ingenious speaks volumes about how mechanical the art of management had become at that time.

The One Minute Manager was a clarion call to organizations to start using their hearts as well as their heads, and to get involved one on one with the people whose lives they hold in their hands. As a sustainable innovation, the practice came up a little short. It is worth noting that Blanchard's latest book is titled Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute. But it changed the way many people thought about business.  It was no longer about pushing buttons; it was now about relationships. x

Management by Wandering Around

"Management by wandering around" was one of the first ideas Tom Peters put forth that caught the imagination of managers. The idea is simply that executives and other managers can learn more about their organizations by getting out and seeing things firsthand than by examining monthly reports.

MBWA is a prevention-based approach, because it lets managers find out what's eating employees, and do something about it, before the irritations fester into full-blown pustules.^[20] At its best it means coming down from the executive floor and getting involved -- participating in teams, running a finger over doorsills for dust, asking people at the loading docks what's on their mind. Seeing for yourself if the vision you think you've been inculcating has taken root.

Having breakfast with workers in an informal setting with small groups or individuals is a great way to deepen your understanding of employees' issues, while uncovering operational glitches that stand in the way of customer satisfaction.

An insurance executive we know sees himself as a kind of organizational mole or double agent, spending well over half of his time walking around, talking to workers, uncovering problems or perceptions of problems, and then challenging his senior managers to come up with solutions. When an employee resigns, the executive personally reads through the transcripts of the exit interview to find out what made the person want to leave.

MBWA is a Pull initiative in that it is about doing a better job, not avoiding pain. But in a company where Pull is a new concept, MWBA will have employees running for the hills. "The boss is coming!" If a dog knows you by your club, do not expect him to greet you with wagging tail.

In multi-site organizations MBWA presents an interesting challenge: how do you walk around when the "around" is transglobal? You walk when you can walk, and you use other means when you have to. Federal Express executives are expected to visit local stations whenever they visit a city where FedEx operates.

Technology also comes in handy. Interactive Intranets maintain an ongoing, public, anonymous Q&A session between workers and bosses. Companies like FedEx maintain global television networks to give associates around the world a chance to talk live with the head honchos.. Access is more than a ploy to make workers feel they are important; it's a vital conduit for ideas that can keep organizations competitive. x

Customer Satisfaction

Like most good change themes, customer satisfaction comes at us with all the power of something that should have been perfectly obvious, but which organizations have too long ignored.

Customer satisfaction has always merited lip service: "The customer is always right." "The customer comes first." In recent years, however, the customer has become king with a vengeance. Everyone is scurrying to learn what customers want, whip up something approximating that, and shine it back at the customer base. "See?"

Unfortunately, American business has succumbed in wholesale fashion to substituting marketing gimmicks (the manipulation of customer perceptions) for the genuine article (treating customers with respect, and providing them with products and services that help them achieve their objectives). Vast, grisly books could be written about this trend, which continues today, even at companies that mouth solemn pieties about customer satisfaction.

The customer satisfaction idea saved quality control from itself. Years ago quality was an internally defined idea. Engineers and designers prided themselves on designing high quality items, exceeding everyday specs. At the beginning of the video revolution, 3M put great store in designing tape cases to survive falls from a height of 30 feet. Problem was, customers weren't dropping cases from that height -- 30 inches was the only crash-proofing they needed. No wonder Fuji, which actually met and talked with customers, could sell truckloads of tape for a third 3M's initial cost. 3M was making Cadillacs for customers who wanted a Chevy.

It would be a good thing if most organizations simply reverted to the old nostrums and put the customer first. There are many easy ways to get employees working far from customers to think about customers. One is to select a few, take them to meet customers and talk to them, and have them inoculate other workers with the new thinking upon their return.

It is important not to make customers into gods. Many companies, in the fast food and overnight delivery industries, for instance, achieve success not through catering to individual customer requests but by providing a simple universal operational model that saves customers money. They don't ignore the customer, exactly, but they ignore the individual customer's druthers in favor of the average customer's needs.

Ford Motor made affordable automobiles, so long as you liked black. McDonalds serves cheap burgers fast, so long as you like them with the works. Southwest Airlines will get you where you want to go at lowest cost, but please don't slow down the boarding process.

Lots of organizations get carried away (see box). They extend the external customer model to people working inside the organization as well -- "internal customers" -- a mistake. Or they allow customer judgment to smother the entrepreneurial spark of management and the engineering talent of designers.

We warned earlier that Pummel organizations only concern themselves about the happiness of ownership, and that that imbalance threatened the long-term security of the organization. Pamper organizations cater to their employees' every need, with the same result. Customers are another constituency that can be overserved.

Other companies understand that customers cannot be relied upon for the best insights into the future. Customers generally ask for some variation on present-day products and services -- a VCR that is easy to program, for instance. A truly new idea or technology like interactive video or virtual reality television programming is something a company can only come up with on its own -- by intuiting what customers of the future may find delightful or indispensable. Intuiting means guessing, which means risking. So even in a customer-driven era, there is a place for entrepreneurial spark.

When "customer satisfaction" means you take your eyes off the distant horizon, and your organization's long-term prospects, it has ceased to be a tool and has become a crutch.

Tom Peters based an entire book on the good things that happen when "meeting customer requirements" is set aside, and designers head off toward their own best sense of what is great. Peters calls it the wow! factor, and it is a smart antidote for lazy "customer sat."

But wow! works best when the poetic side of design is invoked, when imagination takes hold of the process and Pulls. Companies that set customer satisfaction aside and hew to strictly mechanistic product improvement strategies are back to making Cadillacs. x

The internal customer idea was first propagated in Richard Shonberger's 1989 book Building a Chain of Customers. Shonberger saw that the customer relationship did not exist solely between the end-customer and the company serving or selling to that customer. Instead, there was a chain of "customer" relationships at every stage and every process in the creation, design and delivery of that product or service.

The internal customer idea swayed enough people in and out of the quality movement that for years it constituted an official item under the Quality Assurance section of Baldrige Award criteria, "Business process and Support Service Quality."^[21] In truth, the concept was a great way for organizations whose functions had traditionally been at war with one another to make peace and focus on a common adversary -- the company's competitors. Books were written about ingenious programs linking intracompany teams in a necklace of vision statements, internal guarantees ("your work returned in 24 hours or we won't charge your corporate account"). It was a great consciousness raiser.

A backlash developed when observers criticized internal customers as justifying bureaucracy and distracting workers from their true customer, the one who buys the product/service and thus pays for everyone's groceries.

The best way of using the internal concept may be as a what-if. Rather than instituting formal programs to legitimize the parties you hand work off to, and issuing guarantees and signing peace treaties and all that, why not cultivate an attitude within teams and functions that the next team and function down the hall is not the enemy. What if they were your customer -- how differently would you deal with them? Would you withhold information and communication? Would you ignore them, or throw work over their transom and run away?

What if you began seeing the guy working at the next desk, instead of competing against you for corporate payroll resources, as your customer, and thus an ally in obtaining greater company profits? Big difference there. What if your company began seeing you not as someone to heap stress on, but instead as someone to be kept happy and productive -- as a kind of customer, who must be persuaded to keep your brain and muscle in the organization's employ? x

Adventure Learning

Adventure learning is a group event in which a team is put through a series of challenging physical and mental tasks. They often take place outdoors, in an idyllic setting, at a retreat in the mountains, or a dude ranch, or a park. They are facilitator-led, and they build on the psychological lessons learned years ago in '70s-ish, Carl Rogers' style encounter groups for normals.

Back then it was discovered that people could experience sensational breakthroughs in behavior if asked to do things they do not ordinarily do, with the rest of the group acting as support. The classic example is "Trust Falls." In this exercise you put a blindfolded person on a table, then let them fall backward, with the other group members catching the falling individual.

There are higher risk and lower risk levels of adventure learning. High risk involves climbing mountains, crossing rope bridges, rapid descents on pulleys, and the like. There is some degree of actual physical danger in high ropes exercises -- your teammates could decide not to belay you with their support ropes, and you could fall off the mountain. Low risk is adventure learning on a budget, usually a series of physical outdoors exercises that can be done in a park or backyard.

These games are a lot of fun to play. Most new teams are pretty stiff and formal with one another. They have never met outside the work situation. These games help break the ice, and get people physically involved with one another. We are talking group grope here, and there are moments that will strike some as risqué, a sort of company-sanctioned Twister.

The lessons people learn in these groups include overcoming fear, overcoming distrust, and the synergistic power of a group working to support the individual. People who do this rave about it. They say it enabled them to do things they could never do. They say it changed their lives. Afterwards there is much hugging, exulting, people saying, "Why didn't we do this years ago?"

Everyone is ecstatic, certain that the lessons of teamwork will naturally translate to something wonderful once they get back to the office. But ... when the team folds up its ropes and packs away its carabiners and heads back to the city, are they a better team?

Usually they are not. People may be friendlier. They may feel that they got to know one another out of the work setting. They may have lots of good warm fuzzies toward one another -- which is good. They may head back with better intentions to team with one another -- also good.

But they will not be a better team because the mountaineering or web-climbing exercises were not really about teaming. These activities were not developed to improve teamwork. They were developed to explore various dimensions of personal development. They are fantastic for achieving personal breakthroughs with one's own demons and fears. And yes, they are very good at improving one's personal attitudes about being in groups, and allowing oneself to trust others.

Teams are not failing because people have fears and phobias, or are unable, in a broad generic way, to "trust." Teams are failing because members are confused about what their roles are, what their mission is, whether or not they have the authority to do whatever needs to be done.

All this stuff with the carabiners and pulleys is great fun, and personally exhilarating. It is also pointless. Training firms that sell adventure learning for the personal exploration benefits are giving you your money's worth. Training firms that sell adventure learning for the teambuilding benefits are selling you a bill of goods.

     The Culture Theme

We said earlier that the best way to change is to be new -- to not have an existing infrastructure or culture that will constantly be calling you back to the way you were. Infrastructure is buildings, roads, and machines; culture is what a company is after the buildings, roads, and machines are blown up and hauled away. Culture is the more durable of the two.

Culture is tough to consciously change because it is seldom consciously put in place to begin with. Instead, it usually arises unbidden from employees' perception of the boss's personality. Because its purpose is to minimize the pain of nonadaptation, it focuses on avoiding negatives -- wearing unpressed pants or speaking out of turn.

This culture is often at odds with the stated culture. Most places have a de jure culture that they claim adherence to, and a de facto one that is the obvious object of their allegiance. The unofficial one is the more powerful of the two. It thrives on Pummel from above and cowardice from below: so long as everyone agrees to abide by these unspoken rules, they will hold sway.

There are happy talk books out there that suggest that altering corporate culture is no more difficult than reducing product defects or speeding up cycle time. You simply assess what you are like now, describe what you would rather be like in the future, and take the necessary action steps to transform. Only three steps, but each one is a doozy -- you will need carabiners and grappling hooks and long, long ropes to get to the top of them.

Of all the attributes an organization has, culture is the most human, and it will not yield quickly or easily to any mechanistic solution. The only way we know for an organization bring disparate cultures into alignment is to behave the same way in real life as you say you will in your mission statement. And give yourselves six months before expecting to see even minor improvement. That is like giving up fatty foods; few organizations have the stomach for such a commitment.

Suggestion: if you are CEO or team leader, and you have been in that position for a significant period of time, and you perceive that the group you lead needs a life-giving jolt to the heart of its culture, go away. Chances are excellent that you are at least part of the problem, and not the best person to lead in its solution.x

To understand the de facto culture of a place, all you need to do is ask employees. We elicited these remarks, ranging from the quirky to the obnoxious, explaining the atmosphere where they work from workers at a single site. Needless to say, none of this appeared in the mission and vision brochure.  :

"Individual effort is encouraged, but mavericks are terminated."

"We talk about cooperation, but build organizational firewalls."

"We think strategically, but manage tactically."

"We promote strong performers into do-nothing positions, the Peter Principle in reverse."

"Our value measures are internal, our customers are external."

"We promote quality, but reward quantity."

"We manage the many to correct the problems of the few."

"They put out free doughnuts in the cafeteria on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which is the day that all employees and retirees receive a turkey. Anyone other than a retiree who tries to take a doughnut is hunted down by one of the Nazi kitchen staff."

"If they hear we are gossiping they post notices telling us to stop gossiping ."

"They don't really want us to have more than two company-provided writing utensils at our desk. (I have over 100.) On the other hand, they spare no expense on computer equipment."

"They give us fruit on Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunch. If we take more than two pieces, we get scolded."

"They don't allow professionals to work part-time or from home."

"They throw a Men's Party and a Women's Party, on different days, each year. The Men are served brats and beer, and they all smoke big cigars and play poker. The Women are served thimblefuls of cheap champagne, receive pastel-dyed carnation corsages, and get to listen to peppy organ music. "

"They mail us soft cheese and a depressing letter at Christmastime." x

The Boundaryless Corporation

One way organizations have tried to beat the culture problem by pretending its walls aren't there any more. GE's Jack Welch got a lot of mileage from his idea of a "boundaryless corporation." William Davidow and Michael Malone wrote a best-selling book called The Virtual Corporation, about ad-hoc organizations that form, perform, and melt away again when the task is completed.

Still other wall-erasing approaches include partnering, outsourcing, supplier empowerment, core competencies and consolidation through mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs. In each case, the original organization loses some of its contour, and a new shape springs into existence.

And why not? It is said that an ordinary corporation is a "legal fiction." I.e., Chemical Bank or Ralston Purina are treated under the law as if they were people, but obviously they are not. Well, these corporations are even more fictional:

A virtual corporation is an electronic fiction. It brings people with special talents together, partners them together for the duration of a project, then vanishes back into the mists. It exists only to the extent that phone lines, computers, video and fax technology link its parts together. A virtual corporation is thus not only boundaryless, it is nearly substanceless as well. The advantages of a virtual corporation are flexibility, low cost, and the very high quality that comes with hand-picked people.

Partnering is when two or more organizations team up and pretend they are one organization. The partnership can be between two equals, as when IBM and Apple cooperated on chip development. Or it can be between a hub corporation that calls the shots and numerous subordinate partners, working essentially as suppliers to the hub. Texas Instruments, long a leader in the semiconductor business but losing market share in the 1980s, was having problems coordinating its Pacific Rim subcontractors. How to integrate seven competing vendors 5,000 miles from corporate HQ? TI devised a “virtual factory” concept that treated far-flung warring suppliers as if they were working side by side under one roof.^[22] True partners must learn to behave as if they were one company, and that means getting beyond the old win/lose mentality. Partnering cannot succeed if one party is preying on the other.

Supplier empowerment is when a supplier relationship is lifted to the level of near-equal with the hub company. The supplier are trained to make decisions on the client organization's behalf, have access to information systems, and otherwise behave as if they were one company, not two. An example would be Roadways Logistics acting as Ford Motor Company's logistics unit, managing all inbound and outbound shipments from within Ford's parts docks. In the New Age, suppliers must not be pitted against one another. One of Deming's 14 Points is to use just a few suppliers, and aim for quality, not the low bid.

Outsourcing is the decision by a company to let an outside entity do work that used to be done inside the company. The conventional wisdom: only farm out tasks not central to your organization's identity: accounting, information management, printing, legal. Farm out all tasks and you have reduced your organization to a broker.

Core competencies distinguish a visionary corporation from a confederacy of SBUs. They answer the question, What combination of talents do we possess -- that no other company in the world has? A company's core competency is whatever talent or skill or knack it has, as an organization, that it dare not abandon. In an age of outsourcing, subcontracting, and partnering, a core competency is the one thing you do not outsource, offload, , subcontract, or hand off to a partner. It's the most valuable knowledge a company has, its true, essential product or service.

 

In the wake of all this wisdom, organizations everywhere are scratching their heads trying to determine what their core competency is. Guess what? Most of us are extremely plain vanilla. We don't have any core competency beyond being ourselves, and bringing whatever unique charm we can to the business at hand. Yes, we have a challenge to distinguish ourselves from our competition, but no, core competency may not be the mechanism for us to do that.

Core competencies are a prime example of selling old wine in new bottles. What is there about the concept that is not recognizable in the old adage, "Stick to your knitting?" The genius of the idea, as with so many, is its ability to take the truth of this worn-out thought, and reinvesting it with modern meaning. x

 

There are dozens of relationship-related initiatives that violate the traditional corporate shell. In each case they cause problems relating to culture. The fallacy is that two or more cultures can collide and they will merge together like a molten glass; they tend to shatter, more like cold glass.

Here are the characteristic miscalculations of boundaryless organizations:

                 ƒ  Some are more equal than others. However much a hub partner like IBM promises to let you maintain your identity, be afraid. When another company buys all of your food, it is not a relationship between equals. Which means their culture will inevitably try to dominate yours.

                 ƒ  Add their problem to yours. You may be three years into an ISO 9000 registration plan, but your new hub partner wants you to do the Baldrige assessment as well. To get on the same page with your partner, you will either have to force employees through two mind-wrenching regimens, or dump one that other people were committed to.

                 ƒ  Sell the farm. Many companies have partnered themselves into the intellectual graveyard, spinning off competencies that lay too close to the core. Kodak lets IBM do its data processing, which is fine. But Chrysler and Toyota both farm their auto designs to design partners -- if they can do that and still call themselves car companies, it will be amazing.

                 ƒ  Strings attached. When Control Data restructured in the 1980s it created a partner to perform human relations tasks, and charged it to market its skills to the outside world. Before letting it go, though, it crippled the new creature by saddling it with handling all of the old corporation's personnel problems, leaving it no time to attract outside clients. The partnership was just a ruse for dumping bad business.

                 ƒ  The carnivorous collaborator. Most outsourcing is done to cut costs. By retaining high-value competencies while farming out lower-value competencies, an organization signals that the partner is little more than a sweatshop, working its people to the bone while the hub partner buys another ten years of the good life.

                 ƒ  How convenient. Many partnerships move accountability outside the hub organization's control. You say your offshore partner uses prison slave labor, or makes Bangladeshi kids work 12 hour days? News to us. File this tactic under "plausible deniability."

"Virtualizing" is not a bad idea, and in the years ahead it will contribute greatly to the flexibility that success in the information age will demand of organizations. But it will be very hard on the rank and file as they carry the water and feel the pain for these evanescent entities.

In dealing with new partners, always seek equity with them. To be on the spoke end of a hub and spoke relationship is never pleasant. At its worst, you will have old-line Pamper organizations feathering their nests by exporting Pummel to yours. x

Teams

The subject of teams could go under several other themes -- Relationship, Improvement, or Democracy. It involves all those ideas to a strong degree. We choose to place it under Culture, because team failure can usually be traced to problems in moving from a non-team culture to one encouraging cooperation.

Teams are an old concept, dating back at least to the cave era, to the notion that people who collaborate together perform better than people who compete against one another. In a few short years since importing the notion from Japan, teams have become as American as apple pie, hot dogs, and Chevrolet combined. It is the biggest of all change initiatives, tried in more organizations than TQM and reengineering combined.

 

The apex of the team movement is the self-directed work team, a miracle of empowerment, cross-functional participation, and "leaderless leadership." The core idea in all is that people with different skills and talents can be exceptionally productive and creative working together without conventional supervision.

In all this implementation, there have been lots of successes. Companies have saved billions by moving people out of purely supervisory positions and into flatter workgroups. teams have improved quality and productivity nearly everywhere they have been tried. Teams do work -- eventually.

But few of these team successes were achieved without misdirection, false starts, demoralization and unwanted turnover, as valuable people decided they could not adapt to the new regime.

There are a dozen different reasons for team failure, chief among them:

                 ƒ  inexperienced or ineffective team leadership. The designated team leader either doesn't know what he or she is doing, or is not up to the task.

                 ƒ  lousy communication. Team members are unsure what their task is, what their roles are, how they make decisions, and if they are on the right track or not.

                 ƒ  one size fits all. Teams are not the answer to all of life's problems, and no one kind of team is better in all circumstances than others. Teams should be trained and equipped for the mission they must accomplish. How they decide things, who's in charge, who gets rewarded what, and who does what job are matters that must be tailored to each individual team.

                 ƒ  doing today's work with yesterday's tools, policies, and structures. When you switch to teams, you have to change just about everything about the way your business operates -- measurement, compensation, reporting, job classifications, the works.

Other, lesser problems:

                 ƒ  unled teams. In the rush to create self-directed work teams, organizations either neglect to assign leadership roles, or they allow leadership vacuums to develop and grow. Not every group will intuitively find its natural leaders.

                 ƒ  wrong size. Teams peak in efficiency at three or four people; in many cases they peak at two. Calling a department of twenty people a team is a figure of speech. What you more likely have are a necklace of teams and teams within teams. What's nice for departmental morale is not nice for team functionality. Figure out where the team begins and ends. Everyone else is an adjunct.

                 ƒ  unready teams. Teaming takes time. A new team must pass through many ritual stages before it has the trust and will to move forward together.

These are nuts-and-bolts problems teams have. The core problem is more pernicious, and it is that, all too often, the happy talk about team productivity is a smokescreen for downsizing, the stripping of middle management from the bureaucratic grid.

The rationale for this downsizing is often good: why have trained professionals working between levels in an organization when we can apply all our muscle to customer solutions? Companies thinking this way move their middle managers out to the edge of the circle, where the customers supposedly are, and all that wasted corporate genius is applied directly to giving value to customers.

At most organizations, however, a different dynamic is at work. The company only changes because it is in trouble. It identifies teaming as a way to get more bang for the payroll buck. It keeps some middle managers, but lays off many more, never to return. Hurray for the morale of stockholders; boo for the morale of surviving workers, and for the careers of those who have been given the team axe.

Teams provide a textbook example of how all change initiatives fail. Management presents the idea as a gift to employees, and just like the Trojan Horse, wheels it inside the corporate walls. But employees can hear the gang of downsizers already knocking heads together inside the horse's gut. When employees sense betrayal, the negatives flow to the fore. The change is crippled at the most inopportune possible moment. Just when an organization is trying to cultivate a new atmosphere of sharing and trusting among its fledgling teams, it hurts its efforts by withholding key information about who lives and who dies, violating the very trust it is trying to inculcate.

Our last collaboration, Why Teams Don't Work, was a book about the problems inherent in team theory. Our premise was that teams were failing because the theory didn't go far enough. Team theory represents a giant leap in our time from a view of organizations that was anchored in a philosophy of management to a new view, in which groups are capable, with a little leadership and a little encouragement, of managing themselves.

Teams ask organizations to alter their entire way of thinking away from pitting people against one another in the old grid, and toward allowing them to work together. Away from intracompany competition, and toward intracompany collaboration. It is a big step, and most companies slip up because their culture is too competitive to allow the change to take hold.

Teams are not going to go away. They draw on a very important wellspring in nearly every human being -- the fascination and allure of group activity. But teams have natural limits. And they will never perform up to expectations until organizations learn to look one layer deeper than teams, beyond small groups to the individual's heart and mind, where the three circles of change overlap, and where change succeeds or fails. x

     The Democracy Theme

As we travel further to the left side of Changeland, we come to the Democracy theme, which has many points in common with a theme way back on the right side -- the Reform theme. The two themes tend to seek the same ends, but for very different reasons.  Reform initiatives like reengineering, flattening, and downsizing seek to create new organizational shapes that Push people to better results. Democracy initiatives seek changes that Pull human to a higher level of interactivity and accountability, with the pleasant side-effect of improved results. . Thought the spirits are very different, the net results are often the same. To flatten an organization is to liberate those who once toiled at the base, and vice versa.

To make empowerment work, throw out the word empowerment and replace it with boundary management.

Boundary management sets strict parameters to empowerment. So instead of telling employees: "Do whatever you think seems right and we'll probably back you up on it" -- a prescription for dread -- you inform workers what their decision-making limits are:

      †  You have the power to adjust bills up to $100 on your own, on the spot, to make amends for customer dissatisfaction. Over $100, you ask permission.

      †  You have the power to delay delivery of a product for one week on your own, to make sure it is done right. Longer than that, you ask permission.

      †  You have the power to allocate purchasing costs 5% of the total to improve the order (enlarging type size on a print order, for instance) without getting permission. Above 5%, you get permission.

The range removes the guesswork and allows the worker to exercise judgment without being second-guessed.

Ironic downside: If you're on a use-it-or-lose-it budget, ranges can have a low as well as a high end. If your employer won't allocate your department an equal share next year unless it spends all of this year's money (and what a fine policy that is) you may be empowered to spend only amounts that bring you close to your allocation ceiling. Below that, don't bother. x

Empowerment

The most celebrated of the democratic initiatives is empowerment. It is the magical ingredient of Pull. In its simplest form, it is the boss saying to employees, "You no longer have to ask me for permission to do the right thing for customers. You are empowered to do it yourselves."

Nordstrom, the Seattle-based department store, is the archetypal empowerer. Their entire policies and procedures rulebook fits on a matchbook:

                 ƒ  Don’t steal.

                 ƒ  Don’t chew gum.

                 ƒ  And use your best judgment at all times to guarantee customer satisfaction.

Nordstrom rode this philosophy to unheard of heights in the 1980s. It was perfect for a high-end, customer-oriented retail outfit, where mistakes could be absorbed into high profit margins. But it isn't perfect for companies working closer to the bone. And it isn't right for every employee, not even at Nordstrom.

In the typical organization, battered silly by decades of untrustworthy behavior, an empowerment program may be launched with no side subscribing to its value except the consultant selling the package. It is a case of trying to make a leap in one day from the dark age of Pummel to the New Age of Pull, and it is preposterous.

Consultant's optimism: "Empowerment frees workers up to use their heads, do their best, be on the lookout for opportunities to improve, identify and prevent quality failures before they occur, and transmit information about failures back through the company in order that others can learn from it. Key point: always get paid in advance."

Management's nostalgia: "In the old days of Horatio Alger and spunky entrepreneurialism we were not empowered by patrons -- we secured power on an individual basis by acting intelligently and responsibly. We'll give this empowerment thing a run but our hearts still yearn for the way things were. If they transmit information about too many failures, we go to the mattresses. Key point: pass out the guns but hold onto the ammo."

Employees' cynicism: "Horatio Alger's plucky youths would have as much of a shot in this organization as the Energizer Bunny would have in a den of lions. We'll nod our heads and pretend to swallow this garbage, but be on the lookout for the inevitable switchback. And continue to sweep those foul-ups under the carpet. Key point: no sense volunteering to give blood." x

Done right, empowerment, the transmission of decision-making power down from management to ordinary workers, is the most powerful change element at work in organizations today. But it is also the most paradoxical.

One paradox concerns the transferability of power. If I have all power and I give you half, with the expectation that you will use it precisely the way that I would, are we then equally powerful? Or have I retained all but a ghost of the power I "transferred" to you? Will you exercise power confidently if you know I can snatch it back from you at the first sign of trouble?

Nordstrom, for instance, is an empowerer with an asterisk, for its brand of empowerment does not include worker organization. Nordstrom is copying the Japanese empowerment model of weak unions and patriarchal employers. Workers who have been burned in the past -- and retail sales is one of the most flammable industries -- may think twice about empowerment that does not include the elemental power of collective bargaining.

The other paradox is the plight of the puppetmaster. So long as workers perform your will, they make the decision you know is right. Once you free them and they follow their own intuitions, they will be right one day and very wrong, in your view, the next. The question is: if you still define right and wrong, did you really empower them? Like toothpaste out of the tube, they will never be quite under your control again, and tons of peppermint-flavored frustration will pile up on both sides.

Sometimes empowerment fails because it is never taken seriously. Workers know from the get-go that the initiative is hypocritical, because, well, they know management. So these people never blossom into the empowered angels of the literature, going to uncalled-for lengths to ensure customer satisfaction, and damn the cost. They know it is just a developmental phase management is going through, which will soon loop back into the customary degree of Pummel or Push.

And that's the optimal empowerment failure. Worse is the betrayal that workers did not see coming. They had believed they were being treated like adults, for the first time ever, and were making efforts to behave like adults -- and then are set back in the playpen. Empowerment failures are the most emotionally devastating of any change initiative.

Empowerment goes wrong two ways:

                 ƒ  Employees can be encouraged to make managerial decisions, but not given a clue as to how these are made. This is the extreme of Pamper. Giving decision-making authority to someone without training or equipping them with some sense of the parameters of decision-making isn't empowering them; it's abdicating your own authority. It is both cruel and crazy, like giving a child a gun.

                 ƒ  Employees are told they are empowered, and trained and equipped to make managerial decisions, but they don't believe it, and are thus loath to use the power. This is the borderland between Pummel and Push, where people have been bullied too long to believe you're suddenly a nice guy. These not-quite empowered people are sadder cases than the kids with guns; they may be burning inside to do the right thing, but they are just too scared.

Even when you empower people the right way, providing them with actual authority, and teaching them exactly how to use it, there can be problems.

The biggest problem is stress. Scads of people like being unempowered. It is peaceful and relatively undemanding. You can work through an entire day, doing your job well, stacking crates, without once worrying about your executive judgment.

When you have the power to make decisions that may help or hurt your company, and that may or may not bring down the ire of the Powers That Be, you start to sweat a little. So the most important challenge of any organization bent on pushing power down to the trenches is to provide stress-reduction mechanisms, training wheels to help keep your empowerment efforts upright.

Examples of training wheels: mentoring systems, printed guidelines, panic buttons, hotlines, anything that allows the individual to seek assistance when unsure of a situation, or until he or she becomes more confident.

The latest findings are that empowerment, with managed boundaries, works in the few organizations that are serious about it. A 1996 University of Southern California study showed that only 10 percent of employees in Fortune 1000 companies are engaged in participative management practices. It was the first study to find a clear link between employee involvement and profitability.^[23]

If your organization wants to join the ranks of the profitable, you will have to outlaw punishment for empowered people who screw up. This is a great challenge for the benign managerial mindset -- staying your hand when you are just aching to let someone have it.

Think proactive. Think prevention. Model good judgment. Provide assistance.

And when an omelet burns, as they will even in New Age paradise, eat it and pretend you like it. x

Diversity

Diversity is the most mishandled of all change ideas. It grew out of the desire to comply with federal Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action requirements, calling upon businesses to hire and promote without respect to race, gender, creed, or national origin. These measures were adopted to redress grievances of groups that had been locked out of organizations or, if allowed in, restricted to menial jobs.

These laws were passed in the wake of 1968's Kerner Commission, which found that racist hiring practices were keeping minorities, especially African-Americans, from their fair share of the employment pie. Their purpose was to punish companies with unfair or exclusionary hiring practices, and to serve companies that complied with a badge of pride. "We are an Equal Opportunity Employer" was a sign that a company would choose its employees from the largest possible pool of qualified applicants. It was a smart management tool, using the regulatory clout of the federal government to guarantee that the right thing would be done. It typifies the Push urgency that drives successful organizations.

In the eyes of many, however, it was not enough for a company to stop discriminating against applicants from any group. A company must proactively go out and find qualified candidates from other groups, lure them into the organization, and then train the existing workforce to acknowledge and honor all the different backgrounds and use these differences to benefit the company. That's a lot of change.

In the hands of the diversity movement, companies had to go beyond what was legally and morally indicated, and make a virtue out of diversity for its own sake. A backlash against diversity began.

Though diversity aims toward creating a single diverse entity, it can have the effect of maintaining divisions between groups. To the conservative-minded, diversity signals social engineering, reverse discrimination, white-male bashing, and liberal, paternalistic racism. To the liberal-minded, diversity is a way of ushering in people who have been banished from the feast and reminding the unenlightened that the American dream is still a lot easier if you are white.

Diversity training is a source of bitter controversy to those who feel that multiculturalism is a stalking horse for lowered standards and "special treatment." But it is equally easy to defend, because no company wants to appear indifferent to such an important issue.

Doing diversity right requires a strong combination of Push and Pull. The Pull must be more than self-righteous racism-bashing, though. It must be the understanding that cooperation and sharing the wealth is in everyone's self-interest, no matter what their ideology or ethnicity. The Push must be equally strong, management's unmistakable message to employees: "Integrate or emigrate."

Of course. organizations could overcome racism a lot more directly and a lot more effectively if the "right attitude" were modeled and not just taught, and equal opportunity were given its due, not just lip service. Fewer than 40 African-Americans hold any of the top three offices in Fortune 500 corporations. If boards and search committees chose more qualified black candidates for the positions of CEO, COO and CFO, the burden of demonstrating fair-mindedness would shift from the rank and file to leadership -- where the power is, and where the burden rightfully belongs.

Side note: companies experiencing stresses and strains from infighting might look to an unlikely source for leadership: the Amiables that are usually happy just be along for the ride. The Amiable temperament is a model the rest of us can learn from, to better appreciate difference and overcome disagreements. It is slow to resentment and reluctant to blame -- valuable traits in a time when everyone blames everyone else for everything. x

Diversity proponents claim that diversity is a secret weapon for eliciting opinions and opening markets that are unknown to the white-bread managing class.

But is it true? Is "diversity" a tactical business advantage? Yes, provided you define diversity in its broadest sense, beyond the narrow, group-based , politically correct version making the rounds.

For instance: hiring an African-American with the idea of exploiting that person's African-American wisdom for future product and market development implies that there is a monolithic African-American wisdom that all "African-Americans" have in equal amounts -- a supposition of iffy liberal-mindedness.

Eventually the company will find it didn't hire an African-America; it hired George. Companies that hired George hoping George would present the African-American point of view found out that George could only present George's point of view. His wisdom might be terrific or it might be lousy. Its degree of "African-American-ness" is unquantifiable.

Strategic thinker Gary Hamel talks about the need to inoculate organizations with "genetic diversity" -- ideas generated outside the organization's native culture. He describes the four corners of a single intersection in Toronto, each of which houses one of Canada's largest banks. All the nation's banking brains are entirely clustered in one spot. They hired from one another, imitated one another, and breathed the same air as one another. What are the odds, Hamel asked, of a startling new idea occurring within any one of those four banks?^[25]

Forget color and religion and go after difference in thought. It's a lot more effective, and it takes a load off George. x

Open-Book Management

If employees are valuable, all employees have the right to information bearing on their futures.

Open-book management is a Push/Pull initiative in which the Pull comes first, as the organization opens its financial books for employees to see. The Pull is the notion that employees are important, that their minds matter as well as their muscle, and that their destiny can be put squarely in their hands. The Push is linking that destiny to performance goals that must be met.

For many employees, open-book management is the first time they ever have dealt with concepts like cash flow and balance sheets. It is also the first time they have confronted head-on the business realities their jobs depend on.

Advocates of a strong Push approach are often leery of open-book management because it does not allow them the full range of Machiavellian "book-cooking" and fact-focusing. They prefer the flexibility of describing the platform as fully aflame, instead of the slow smoldering most P&L sheets show.

With the right training, employees have shown they respond well to the open book approach. Now that they have the raw data, all that remains is to provide employees with the challenge and the tools to make the numbers better. Open-book initiatives that succeed often require that an employee's total earnings be linked to pre-established profit targets for the business they are in.

Suggestions: base compensation not on quarterly or semiannual reports but on a continuous measurement of successes occurring in desirable areas -- customers retained, inventory turns, number of complaints received, percentage of new products to old, percentage of new customers to old. Do not contrive results by squeezing assets. A six-month report comes too late to do anything about.

And base rewards not just on companywide results, over which they have little control, but on the results of the unit or division or team that they can directly contribute to. x

     The Otherness Theme

The otherness theme is the ultimate New Age realm. It is a revolutionary one, for it goes against the key aspect of human nature we have been discussing -- our inherent human disinclination to view new ideas positively.

In the otherness theme, unknowns are not painted in with negatives; they are greeted as positives. Otherness holds that whatever we currently know is inadequate to the tasks before us. In order to become adequate, we have to look outside the conventional knowledge passed painstakingly down to us by the preceding generation.

The art and practice of management is largely predicated upon "the box." It is a metaphor worth exploring. Every organization is a box, an enclosure keeping the world out except through controlled channels, and keeping resources (people, inventory, cash) inside and under control until it is time that each is expended.

The box seems natural to us. Never mind that it is hard enough to find a single straight line in nature, never mind twelve straight lines arranged in meticulous perpendicular/parallel relationship to one another. Boxes probably seem pretty natural to goldfish and hamsters.

We use the metaphor in our organizational charts, in our job descriptions, and our strategic plans. Whatever is in a box, as behaviorist philosopher B.F. Skinner claimed in the 1950s, is in control.

The corporation is literally housed inside one or more boxes. Our offices are boxes. Our desks and computers are boxes. Our heads, in some curious way, are boxes of business, only slightly beveled around the edges by rain, wind, and worry.

 

Which leads us to the point of this book. We are not goldfish and hamsters. But like them we dwell in a world of our own making based on the belief that a stable environment of powerful controls will yield the best outcomes for us -- food, employment, and 401(k) plans.

Only when it is clear we have exhausted the possibilities of our current box, having gnawed through its walls or having it be tipped over by a strong gust from Wall Street, are we able to breathe the real air of the world. This is what the learning organization is always doing.  x

Thinking/Learning

In the unempowered machine age, people were not expected to do a lot of thinking. Or their thinking was of a regulated, mechanical kind. IBM's famous "THINK" sign was not an invitation to open-ended woolgathering, but a reminder to keep working and making widgets. Mad Magazine parodied this mechanistic pathway to performance in the 1950s by respelling it "THIMK."

In the New Age, that's changed. Many organizations feel they are no longer in the widget business, that widgets are just the transient fluff that arises from knowledge. Brain power, not raw materials, is what creates wealth.. Software, not hardware, rules. The world is a thinking place, and we work in learning organizations. Closed minds win no races.

Tom Peters went so far as to suggest managers should stop reading books about management and start reading Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dickinson. That is where surprising insights are likely to occur, not in the centennial edition of The Practice of Management.

The counterpoint to this open-gate philosophy is still valid. It is systems thinking, the theory that individual acts and processes can not be coherent unless they are seen as elements of the entire system they are part of. The system is the big box we do all our work in. Understand it, eliminate its contradictions, and it will work as it was designed to work.

The system is important; Deming in his discussions of profound knowledge says the system is everything. But even he knew the wisdom of getting out of it, composing oratorios and masses for organ in his spare hours. 

Accomplished organizations succeeded by stepping outside their box or mental map. Lands End began as a sailmaker and store. Hewlett-Packard originally set out to make ____, among other things. The fabulous Frisbee began as a pie plate. IBM, the "THINK" company in the '50s and considered by many to be the best-run system of the '80s, never thought its little computers could give its big computers a run, because the company was too snug in its box.

Every visionary and every vision-driven organization spends some time out of the box, arriving at fresh perspectives on what the box contains, or just wandering freely in the larger world.

Push operations lock in on systems thinking; Pull operations focus on knowledge creation. Push wants to make a map of its paradigm; Pull wants to wad the map up, throw it away, spit in the palm and follow where it leads. x

Xenophilia

Globalization has brought us out of our Yankee burrow and got us blinking at the world of ideas outside our cozy comfort zone.

Not long ago Americans maintained a universal attitude of smug superiority toward other countries' efforts. Our engineers, inventers, managers and workers made the rest of the world's look sick. But we've been out-competed, out-strategized, out-qualitied, and out-marketed so many times, in so many places, in the past two decades. Many Americans have flip-flopped completely and reverted to an inferiority complex.

We've come a long way. From xenophobia (remember when it was a joke that a product was marked "Made in Japan"?) to xenophilia, the admiration of all things foreign because they are foreign. Xenophilia is a variant on the New Age theme that all good things happen outside the sphere we are most familiar with. It's illogical, but it has had the happy consequence of bringing a world of new ideas to our attention.

The clearest instance of American xenophilia is our Japanotropism, our automatic regard for anything coming out of Japan. Our business attitudes toward Japan are analogous to our cultural affiliation with Great Britain, and our political solidarity with Israel. We obviously have a soft spot for island nations. It makes it easier that they needed our help to do well. Japan emerged under our protection, and with the help of American advisors like Deming and Juran. Companies like Nissan, Mitsubishi and Sony refashioned American management and marketing practices and then clobbered us at our own game. "They copied us, then improved on us, so they must be good."

The ultimate change initiative may be one which attempts to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, or vice versa -- i.e., go against one thing's entire nature by transforming it utterly into something else. Thus one of the most interesting success stories of our age has been the success American manufacturers have had in adapting Japanese business practices for our use. "They copied us and beat us, and we copied them right back."

Under this theme we have combined a variety of ideas, most of them Japanese, that could easily have fit under themes such as Improvement and Reform. What unites them all is their origin in quite a different culture -- and the remarkable degree of acceptance they have found in our own historically closed culture. That receptivity -- a feat of imagination and "metaphilia" -- is itself a sign of a strong recent shift in American business toward Pull strategies.

                 ƒ  Kaizen means "continuous improvement," and it is the most conspicuous addition Japanese businesses made to Deming's platform of statistical process control. When it bounced back to the U.S. as continuous improvement, it provided an intuitive alternative to the heavy machinery of total quality management.

                 ƒ  Knowledge-creating denotes what many of the best Japanese companies, like Kao (the Japanese Procter & Gamble) take to be their reason for being. Not selling products, not expanding markets, not beating the opposition to pulp -- but the creation of knowledge that will sustain competitive life.

                 ƒ  Poka-yoke ("poka-yokay"). A poka-yoke device is any mechanism that either prevents a mistake from being made or makes the mistake obvious at a glance. As Shigeo Shingo writes, "The causes of defects lie in worker errors, and defects are the results of neglecting those errors. It follows that mistakes will not turn into defects if worker errors are discovered and eliminated beforehand"^[26]

                 ƒ  Kanban. Kanban is the system of card-flagging first implemented at Toyota, that was the basis for the concept of Just In Time. Originally conceived by Taicho Ohno as a flow control system, involving paper cards kept with small on-hand supplies of parts. As bins were emptied, the cards (kanban means card) notified workers of the need to replenish the supply. This system revolutionized inventory management, first at Toyota and eventually around the world.

Like many other change initiatives, Just In Time was rapidly transformed from a tactic into a philosophy, from an inventory management methodology to a mindset of minimum waste and delay. Americanized, the system had nothing to do with cards, and more to do with information technologies like MPR II that kept track of lot amounts and ordered a continuous stream of small shipments of parts so they arrive "just in time" and do not have to be stockpiled (and often lost) in expensive warehouses.

Japanotropia is only one aspect of our new xenophilia. We honor other countries for contributions their companies have made:

                 ƒ  the Swiss for their skills in dealmaking (Nestlé) and radical decentralizing (ABB);

                 ƒ  the Germans for their historic commitment to product quality and customer satisfaction (Daimler-Benz);

                 ƒ  the British for their innovations in quality improvement and service excellence (British Airways);

                 ƒ  the Swedish for their breakthroughs in core competencies and partnering (Volvo).

As the leading edge of the New Age, it is easy to make too much too soon of American xenophilia. Our management is still a formidable force, and we are still very proud of that fact. Xenophobia should be seen not as a major theme but as a counter-theme, a crosscut against the historic theme of isolation and jingoism.

The clearest sign that ours is still an In-Between Age and not a bona fide New Age is reflected in the marketplace: no management book written solely by a Japanese writer has ever sold more than 50,000 copies here. x

Chaos

Want to make a hit at your next board meeting? Announce a major change initiative with the words, "Let's take this organization down the path of total chaos."

And say it like you mean it. Your colleagues will spew coffee across the table at the words. People who have known you for years and have every reason to trust you for your experience and usually sage counsel will bolt from their chairs and demand your resignation.

Everyone present will shake their heads, close their eyes, and picture an orderly organization pushed off the cliff of all that is reasonable, plummeting, all hands screaming, down, down into the abyss of the unknown.

People balk at the notion of chaos, but organizational scholars like Meg Wheatley insist it may be our best friend as we reconfigure ourselves for modern times. The chaos movement springs from the insight that organizations are based on Newtonian notions of linear thinking that have been made obsolete by the findings of physicists and astronomers and biologists in our own time.^[27]

Wheatley believes that the way we've been thinking about organizations (indeed, about everything) for the last three hundred years is simply wrong. The modern view of the world is predicated upon the geometric symmetries of the ancient Greeks -- pure circles, perfect squares, and absolutely straight lines. When better boxes are built, they will be along Euclidean lines.

But nowhere in nature can these pure shapes be found. Instead we have complex, swirling fractal patterns, from the geography of a cell to the landscape of the entire cosmos.

To organizational chaos freaks, it is incumbent upon management to model their organizations not after Euclidean shapes -- the boxes, circles, and right angles of the organizational flowchart -- but from the naturally occurring, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful structures of living things.

Instead of centralized command-and-control, Wheatley suggests, a chaos company will find its own rhythms and patterns, and allow decisions to arise from the collective unconscious of all workers, regardless of "rank" (a Newtonian notion to be dispensed with ASAP.) Chaos is the ultimate out-of-the-box thinking.

One shortcoming of chaos theory that we have noticed is that its view of nature relies mostly on astrophysical observations of nature, and overlooks animal behavior. Animal species tend to organize around a strong theme of hierarchical Pummel -- top dog, lead bull, king lion. As it is presented, chaos seems to ask that we heed only the bizarre and beautiful New Age lessons of nature, and ignore the familiar brutalities.

A few, edge-of-the-edge organizations may profit from heading down this exotic path. We worry about going so far off the left side of the Changeland map that the resulting organization becomes ultra-Pamper.

The best use of the insights of Wheatley, David Bohm and others is as cautionary tools for critiquing your current system: Are we too tight, too rational, too narrow, too pleased with the way that we are, too predictable in the ways we design work, define customers, and manage markets?

The future belongs to organizations that learn to reach out and bring this otherness in -- the foreign, the unfamiliar, the not-invented-here. These impulses and ideas remind us that the thinking we were taught to do is the prisoner of its own limited (and sometimes wrong) knowledge.  x

Throughout this book we have used big company examples to highlight successful change efforts. But the best example we know of a company that looked to the future and took decisive steps to meet it halfway is a humble gas station.

Tracy One-Stop is a service station located on a busy corner in a not-very-promising neighborhood in Saint Paul. The station has been there for 30 years, having carved out a niche in the early days as a supplier of fuels besides gasoline -- liquid propane, lube, kerosene, etc.

As the station aged, and as the neighborhood became tougher, the station could have pulled the plug, let its local employees go, and relocated further out of the urban ring. Instead, it built a fabulous new service center, with four oil-change docks, a full kitchen, a car wash, and convenience grocery. On sunny days an outdoor grill sells hot dogs and brats for a few quarters apiece. The bakery is stocked with better sweets than the best grocery stores.

But it's the people who make Tracy One-Stop special. You can pull up on the coldest day of winter, and a customer courtesy man, usually a gangly, outgoing man named Bob, will be out there with you in the snow, helping with your pumping, oil, or windshield wiper fluid. These are self-serve pumps, mind you.

Over the years, we have witnessed the customer courtesy guys doing everything for customers -- helping them call road service, playing wiffle ball with a child while his parents' car is lubed. If you forget your credit card, they don't stash it in a dark drawer and leave you wondering what became of it. They track you down, call you, and tell you they are holding it for you. Always with an arresting, unfakable air of sincerity.

One day we asked one of the courtesy workers, with the name Ben over his pocket, what gives. Was the head of Tracy a service quality freak? Did some four-star consultant sell them this overhaul as a package?

No, it was just a Push/Pull effort that managers and workers together patched together. This isn't the greatest neighborhood, Ben said, and the place was pretty run-down. "People decided that, if they were going to make it here, they would have to try something different. We decided we were going top be the best service station anywhere."

Just deciding that was no guarantee of succeeding. But they had the right mix of personalities to pull it off. Everyone had family, everyone wanted to make the place a success, and there wasn't a sullen grease-monkey in the group. People like Bob at the pump island modeled for less outgoing workers what cheerful, helpful service looked like. Sure, there was visionary leadership at the top -- the new center was a remarkable investment. But it was the willingness of the workers to try something new that put the effort over the top.

How successful has the effort been? People go a mile out of their way to refuel at Tracy One-Stop. Think about that. And the neighborhood itself is transforming. A new warehouse food store, a new Montgomery Ward, and expanded college campus facilities nearby are a tribute to what a positive spirit can accomplish.

The message in this little homily is that the most successful change initiatives are those that originate in the hearts of the people who will benefit from them. Set aside the bound volumes of procedural changes, video training courses, teambuilding exercises in the Rockies, and giant data systems that tell everyone everything with a single keystroke.

These things may or may not come into play as your change effort, at your organization, rolls out. Before any of it can work, you have to have people whose hearts can be touched, and then you have to touch them.

Tracy One-Stop may seem like an unfair example because the people there seem unaccountably terrific. They are like walking billboards for logotherapy: They have chosen to have change-positive attitudes, and that makes change easier. And it is a lot easier to mould a small family business than a big, impersonal one.

If you had a ready supply of angels to work for you, as Tracy One-Stop appears to, improving product or service quality, or business processes, or the culture of tour organization would be a snap. Everyone would be fabulously great. They would be incapable of anything but excellence.

In some of the New Age managerial ideas, that's how it works. You trust in people's better natures, and their better natures take over and perform. Empowerment vanquishes sloppiness and indifference. Talented people share knowledge and innovate a better world for customers.

But Tracy One-Stop is not a New Age business. It's a filling station, the most conventional, "Old Age" business you could imagine. The people who work there are semi-skilled. They didn't undergo any expensive training, hold touchie-feelie seances, or fall blindfolded into one another's arms.

They changed because the owners and managers took what they knew from the past, made an educated guess about the future, staked out a vision of an In-Between Age way of doing business that would make use of both business philosophies -- the hard edge of the old and the psychological insights of the new.

The truth is, we will always be doing business in the In-Between Age, because we will always be sorting out which past tools to hold onto, and which future visions we are not ready for yet. This picking and choosing, and then acting, is the heart and soul of management.

Though unresolved, the In-Between Age isn't such a bad place to be. It's a place:

                 ƒ  where thinking is permitted. Not a place where people try to make mistakes, but people are given a chance to outlive them. Where risks are carefully weighed and considered. Where every opinion may have value.

                 ƒ  that is learning not to treat people as fuel to be flared. That allows its reputation for fair play to grow over time until it attracts people capable of making the same kind of commitment, to the organization and to each other.

                 ƒ  where people are aware as never before that their work is important. (As distinct from the so-called "Hawthorne Effect," in which people perform better in the short term because they are being fussed over -- change for change's sake.)

                 ƒ  that is looking for an honest balance of survival and fulfillment. Pummel and Pamper are on the wane, leaving most of us in the more rational middle categories of Push and Pull.

These aren't New Age or Old Age ideas. They are ideas for today, for the curious crosswalk of history we find ourselves on, caught between the blinking lights of two different eras, between the need to learn and the need to stay alive.

We began this thinkathon about change by recalling the insights of Viktor Frankl at Auschwitz. His view was a dark Pull: that life is less a place for finding happiness than for finding meaning.

The fatalism of this philosophy is not easily combined with the feel-good philosophies of the New Age. These philosophies are great if we can make them real, but if we can't make them real, they are a danger to us. the In-Between Age is where we combine New Age visions with the skepticism and competence of the age before it.

We need to remember, too, that just because an initiative fails is no reason to give up. The spirit of continuous improvement -- a lovely spirit, once you get to know it -- urges us not to give up hope, even as we concede the difficulty of quick success. In a world driven to achieve higher quality and higher efficiency, we're never quite there. We must content ourselves sometimes with the satisfaction of knowing we are giving it our best effort, and tomorrow is another day. {

      

     A Reading List for the Age of Change

Change Management

  ƒ  Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society. New York: HarperBusiness, 1993.

  ƒ  D. Gwinlivan. In Search of Solutions, Hall & Peter Renner, 1987.

  ƒ  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, When Giants Learn to Dance, Simon & Schuster, 1989

  ƒ  Francis Gouillart and James Kelly, Transforming the Organization, McGraw-Hill, 1995

  ƒ  Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity, Heineman, 1969

  ƒ  Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business, Doubleday Currency, 1992

The Results Theme

‰   "Excellence"

  ƒ  James Collins, Built to Last, HarperBusiness, 1994

  ƒ  Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence, Alfred Knopf, 1982

‰   Zero Defects

  ƒ  Philip Crosby, Quality Is Free, McGraw-Hill, 1979

‰   Management by Objectives

  ƒ  Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management

The Measurement Theme

‰   Benchmarking

  ƒ  G.H. Watson, Benchmarking Workbook: Adapting Best Practices for Performance Management. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1992.

  ƒ  Michael Brassard. Memory Jogger Plus, Methuen, MA: GOAL/QPC, 1989.

‰   The MALCOLM Baldrige Award

  ƒ  Christopher W.L. Hart and Christopher Bogan, The Baldrige, McGraw-Hill, 1989

‰   ISO 9000

  ƒ  David Hoyle, ISO 9000 Quality Systems Handbook, Butterworth Heineman, 1994

The Reform Theme

‰   Downsizing

  ƒ  Robert M. Tomasko, Downsizing:, AMACOM, 1990

  ƒ  Robert Johansen and Rob Swigart, Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization, Addison-Wesley, 1994.

‰   Demassification

  ƒ  M.M. Stuckey, Demass, Productivity Press, 1991

The Integration Theme

‰   Reengineering

  ƒ  Michael Hammer and James Champy. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. HarperBusiness, New York, 1993

‰   Speedup

  ƒ  Christopher Meyer, Fast Cycle Time, The Free Press, 1993

‰   Value Disciplines

  ƒ  Michael Treacy and Fred Weirsma, The Discipline of Market Leaders, Addison-Wesley, 1995

The Improvement Theme

‰   Quality

  ƒ  W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986.

  ƒ  Robert E. Cole, ed., The Death and Life of the American Quality Movement, Oxford University Press, 1995.

  ƒ  Harry V. Roberts and B. Sergesketter. Quality is Personal: A Foundation for Total Quality Management. The Free Press, New York, 1993

‰   TQM

  ƒ  J. Gilbert. How To Eat an Elephant: a Slice By Slice Guide to Total Quality Management, Dunton Green, England: Tudor Business Pub. Ltd., 1992.

  ƒ  Kaoru Ishikawa, What Is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way. Prentice-Hall. 1985

  ƒ  Jack Mogab and William Cole, The Economics of Total Quality Management., Blackwell, 1995

The Direction Theme

‰   Leadership

  ƒ  James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1993

  ƒ  Alan Weiss, Our Emperors Have No Clothes, Career Press, 1995

  ƒ  Max DePree, Leadership Is an Art, Currency Doubleday, 1989

  ƒ  Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Basic Books, 1995.

  ƒ  James Champy, Reengineering Management, HarperBusiness, 1995

  ƒ  Robert Greenleaf, Servant Leadership, Paulist Press, 1977.

‰   Mission and Vision

  ƒ  Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, Harvard Business School Press, 1994,

ƒ      Bob Wall, The Visionary Leader, Prima, 1992

The Character Theme

‰   Organizational Morality

ƒ      Stephen R. Covey, 7 Habit of Highly Effective People, Simon & Schuster, 1989

ƒ      Tom Morris, True Success, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994

ƒ      David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, Arc, 1987.

The Relationship Theme

‰   Theories X, Y and Z.

‰   One-Minute Managing

ƒ      Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager, Morrow, 1982

‰   Management by Wandering Around

ƒ      Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, Harper & Row, 1987

‰   Customer Satisfaction

ƒ      Thomas K. Connellan and Ron Zemke. Sustaining Knock Your Socks Off Service, AMACOM, 1993.

ƒ      D. Keith Denton, Horizontal Management, Lexington Books 1991.

The Culture Theme

‰   The Boundaryless Corporation

ƒ      William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation, HarperBusiness, 1992

ƒ      James Brian Quinn, The Intelligent Corporation, The Free Press, 1992

ƒ      Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow's Workplace, Productivity Press, 1995.

ƒ      Tom Peters, Liberation Management, Alfred Knopf, 1994

‰   Teams

ƒ      Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley. Why Teams Don't Work: What Went Wrong and How to Make it Right. Peterson's/Pacesetter Books, Princeton, N.J., 1995

The Democracy Theme

‰   Empowerment

ƒ      Edward E. Lawler III, The Ultimate Advantage, Jossey-Bass, 1992

ƒ      J. F. Vogt, Empowerment in Organizations. University Associates, San Diego, 1990

‰   Diversity

ƒ      Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Houghton Mifflin, 1990

ƒ      George F. Simons , Bob Abramms, and L. Ann Hopkins, ed. Cultural Diversity, Petersons, 1996

‰   Open-Book Management

ƒ      John Case, Open-Book Management, HarperBusiness, 1995

The Otherness Theme

‰   Thinking

ƒ      Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday, 1990

ƒ      Don Tapscott, Paradigm Shift, McGraw-Hill, 1993

‰   XENOPHILIA

ƒ      Richard Turner Pascale and Tony Athos, The Art of Japanese Management, Harper, 1981

ƒ      Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company, Oxford University Press, 1995.

‰   Kanban

ƒ      Japan Management Association, Kanban: Just-In-Time at Toyota, Productivity Press, 1986.

‰   Kaizen

ƒ      Y. Yasuda, 40 Years, 20 Million Ideas: The Toyota Suggestion System, Productivity Press, Cambridge, 1991

ƒ      Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, North River Press, 1992

‰   Chaos

ƒ      Meg Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Joehler, 1992

ƒ      David Bohm and J. Krishnamurti, The Ending of Time, Harper and Row, 1985.

ƒ      David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity, Bantam, 1987.