By investigating the solutions as you are trying to determine the problem, you get farther ahead. If you knew what they problem was, it wouldn’t be much of a problem: you’d just go ahead and fix it. Most of what we do we don’t truly understand what will work or why. We move around by intuition, using analysis to then determine whether we’re on the right track or how to sharpen our focus.
How to Break Through the “Impermeable Clay Layer” of Middle Managers
In the last post on implementation, APFG commented that the middle layer in the company is where you have most of the problems. Since almost everyone says this, let’s take a look at why. Let’s admit that it is not always true: the middle layer in a company isn’t always the source of the problems. There are often people at …
Implementation
I’ve avoided talking about implementation for awhile. So let’s get into it! I’ve got some questions and thoughts that I’ll be posting over the next few days about the general problems associated with “implementing RO”. Although I think that the whole idea is kind of whacked. It sounds a bit like “how do we get these people on board with …
More Evidence of the High Failure Rate of Performance Improvement Efforts
Top Consultant, a UK-based operation dealing with consultancies, has an interesting article describing a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Celerant Consulting, an affiliate of Novell. Top-Consultant reports that More than 4 in 10 senior executives surveyed in a major new cross-industry study said that performance improvement initiatives undertaken at their companies over the past three …
Implementation for BIG
Let’s play “Let’s Pretend”! Or, if you want to be more grown-up, let’s follow Einstein’s lead and perform a “thought experiment” using a set of hypothetical situations, following a set of changes through to the end. Big Insurance Group (BIG) is a horribly non-requisite organization. There are too many layers or too few, depending on where you are. Managers who …
Tata Sons Implementing Billis’s Levels
I went searching for more information about David Billis’s Worklevels. It turns out that Tata Sons, a Indian consortium of sorts of 80 companies, has implemented Billis’s worklevels in a new management system. The article is, of course, from Tata, but it covers some interesting ground on how a company would implement a SST-based organizational structure. If someone has any …
Organization vs. Spontaneity
Both formal structural organizational methods and informal, emotive and emergent methods must be fostered to have a firm that not only invents but innovates.
CRM Implementation Woes: How to Make It Work
McKinsey Consulting came out with a CRM article the same week I read Mark Van Clieaf’s comments about how to succeed at CRM — he says to run it through Marketing before, during and after implementation. McKinsey’s piece (Anupam Agarwal, David P. Harding, and Jeffrey R. Schumacher, “Organizing for CRM“, McKinsey Quarterly) has some very amusing things to say: In …
Management and Practice: You need both
Every Best Practice becomes a Worst Practice when you have the wrong people in the wrong places.
Reality of Jaques’s Theory of “Requisite Organization Works Over A Weekend”
When I asked earlier about whether Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization could really work over a weekend, I was asking a specifically micro-question: Does changing the structure of the organization produce “instant” results in individuals? I got an answer about the macro question I wasn’t asking: Jaques just doesn’t talk about the process by which the change occurs, from old structure …