The 2,000 Percent Solution: Free Your Organization from "Stalled" Thinking to Achieve Exponential Success - Hardcover

Mitchell, Donald; Coles, Carol; Metz, Robert

 
9780814404768: The 2,000 Percent Solution: Free Your Organization from "Stalled" Thinking to Achieve Exponential Success
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0814404766 ISBN 13: 9780814404768
Verlag: Amacom, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Why do most companies find it so difficult to achieve the growth and progress they plan for? This book offers a look at this problem by exposing the destructive thinking patterns that can imprison both individuals and organizations, and features hints on achieving exponential growth.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald Mitchell is chairman and CEO of Mitchell and Company, a corporate strategy, best practice process improvement, and finance consulting firm. Carol Coles is president and COO of Mitchell and Company. Both have been quoted in BUSINESS WEEK, FORBES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and other publications. Robert Metz is a former Market Place columnist of THE NEW YORK TIMES and author of CBS: REFLECTIONS IN A BLOODSHOT EYE.

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Chapter 2
Knucklebusters and Sawdust
The Tradition Stall
This chapter looks at the most powerful cause of complacency: the unquestioning certainty that nothing will change or should be changed, which is brought on by repetition over many years and possibly even generations. You will learn how to understand when tradition should be challenged and abandoned for the good of the organization. Tradition: The Way It Was If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It A motorist asks a farmer for a glass of water. The farmer obliges, using a hand pump to draw water from a well. The pump handle is close to a board and the farmer curses as he scrapes his knuckles on it. Motorist: "Why not move that board? It serves no purpose." Farmer: "It's been there since my father's time. If it was good enough for him, it is good enough for me." This answer seemed ridiculous, of course. But the motorist later realized he too had long ignored a similar, senseless tradition. His house had a large knob on the outside door that was too close to the doorjamb. He usually twisted the handle to the right and cleared the jamb. Occasionally, though, he twisted the knob to the left and scraped his knuckles on the molding. The Level Playing Field As stalls of tradition go, knucklebumping is small potatoes. But serious tradition stalls are sometimes allowed to exist for decades, even centuries. For generations, sawyers' helpers were blinded by sawdust. Manning the end of a two-handled lumberman's saw, the helper worked at a lower level than his boss. The sawdust floated down into the helper's eyes. The sawyers' helpers could have used Frederick Taylor, who leveled a different playing field. Taylor, a pioneer in measuring work processes, might have extended and improved many lives had he lived hundreds of years ago. In fact, he did his experiments only a century ago. After watching bricklayers routinely heave heavy materials above their heads, Taylor used scaffolding to put man, brick, and mortar at optimum levels for minimum effort by the workers. Until Taylor defied tradition, bricklayers became crippled or disabled after a few years. With his new approach, an able-bodied man could work the job for a lifetime. In the business world today, employers are, in many ways, more attuned to workplace hazards. Most make serious attempts to limit obvious hazards to life and limb. More insidious than such hazards are the stalls that occur because a harmless tradition becomes subverted due to circumstances that have changed markedly. The resulting tradition stall may be more nuisance than travesty, but, even so, the stall can lead to low morale, reduced production, and lower earnings. Consider the next anecdote. Aping Human Beings Imagine a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, so the story goes, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the banana. As soon as it touches the stairs, spray all the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result: All the apes are sprayed with cold water. Do this repeatedly and then just watch when another ape later tries to climb the stairs. The other apes will try to prevent it even though no water sprays them. Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To its horror, all of the other apes attack. After another attempt and attack, it knows that if it tries to climb the stairs, it will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm although it has no idea why it was not permitted to climb the stairs. After replacing the third, fourth, and fifth original apes, all the apes that had been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? "Because that's the way it's always been around here." Sound familiar? Traditional Ways to Toe the Line The Pecking-Order Tradition: After You, Alphonse . . . Imagine that you were asked to speak to the top thirty executives of a very large company. The meeting runs late, and so the food has been sitting on the buffet table long past the lunch hour. Everyone is hungry and needs a break from the intense discussions of the morning session. The breather arrives at last and you, as the honored guest, are escorted through the buffet line first. Then, by company tradition, the CEO goes through the buffet line followed by each executive in the pecking order by descending rank. The most junior executives line up last. But there is a problem: This CEO is a fast eater. Within ten minutes, the CEO has gulped down his last bite. He promptly states that everyone might as well get back to work because there is a lot left to be done. He either does not notice or, having noticed, does not care that only he has finished eating. (A few juniors in the line haven't even filled their plates yet. You are ruefully pleased that you ate fast, too.) After the meeting, you ask the corporate planner what that was all about. The corporate planner explains that the pecking-order tradition was begun under the prior CEO, a slow eater who needed more time to finish than everyone else. The practice had become a tradition and was continued without challenge when the CEO who wolfed his food came on board. The Hazing Tradition: Get Down! In the 1970s, working conditions at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants were hard. To help new executives understand the problems faced by the workers "in the trenches," the new managers were assigned all the dirty jobs in a given restaurant for a day. Eventually, this custom was transformed into a grand tradition of executive hazing. True, the executives became suitably impressed with the hard conditions the workers had to deal with, but they became so embroiled in the hazing aspect of the tradition that they missed key opportunities to address the problems. Mesmerized by a mindless tradition that emphasized hard work in tough conditions instead of imagination and initiative, the corporate culture delayed important improvements for many years. KFC should have been redesigning equipment and restaurant layouts to improve their efficiency and safety instead of merely subjecting the executive to hazing. The Necessity Tradition: When Gillette Was a Young Blade The habit of institutionalizing practices so they become stalls affects all companies. By tradition, formidable Gillette had always introduced new shaving products in the United States first, and then slowly introduced the same new product in its markets around the world on a piecemeal basis. Decades would pass before the new product reached the last country. Finally someone questioned the wisdom of the tradition. It was found to reflect Gillette's limited financial, marketing, and personnel resources in an earlier period. Finally realizing that it was losing sales by sticking with an outdated tradition, Gillette began to introduce new products more or less simultaneously around the world. Sales and profits immediately soared far above the historic level. The Time-Is-Money Tradition: How Much Is This Conversation Going to Cost Me? A company we know of has a tradition of not letting the CEO meet potential investors until the investor relations executive has met with those investors. While this tradition freed the CEO for other important tasks, the company's shares were shunned by that most important group of potential shareholders: the institutions, such as pension funds and mutual funds. Few of these institutional investors were prepared to invest millions of dollars in this company without first meeting the CEO. You can be sure they want the CEO's door to be wide open to them before and after they open their checkbooks. This company has failed to build a list of...

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Verlag
Amacom
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0814404766
ISBN 13 
9780814404768
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
258
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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