In my MBA program there have really only been a few things that I’ve taken note of so I never forget. Most of the items have been around organizational change and how to get a larger, very stagnant organization to improve or adapt to the market. This week I noted a comment from Geoffrey A. Moore in the article “Darwin Moore
Being a lean manufacturing person for the last 9 years I’ve done dozens of kaizen events where we created new process, new standard work and better/more efficient ways of doing things. But once I left the group the changes all but disappeared in some cases and I never could figure out why. Most of the time I just felt is was the managers of the area not wanting to sustain the improvements or they didn’t want to ‘upset’ their team by making them change even though it was for the betterment of the company.
I reality what I did not do was deconstruct the old process. It was too easy to have the old system/process still available to use and go back to. If I had ‘burned the bridge’ to how things used to be I would have had a better chance had sustaining the improvements that had been developed during the kaizen event. Moore
Chris
Great point Chris. Being from a large corporation, its amazing how ways of working become entrenched and almost more of an hindrance to execute a tight timeline than a smaller more agile company. We must have a major reorganization once every three to four year to do just what you say, dismantle the old ways of working and embrace the new. Well its hard for a large company to successively change direction. Some initiatives stick and work, others fail miserably. In one case, we re-orged back to a version of the previous business structure. Times change and companies must adapt to ever faster changing culture and tastes in order to achieve continued success.
ReplyDeleteThis may be why Apple, for many many years, insisted on an annual reorganization. The senior execs reworked the org chart, everyone was out of a job, then they had to scramble to find a new position or they were out. That's a good way to keep change front and center :-) Maybe a little too much so?
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