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SUSTAINING High Performance
The Strategic Transformation to A Customer-Focused Learning Organization
Stephen Haines
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eBook - ePub
SUSTAINING High Performance
The Strategic Transformation to A Customer-Focused Learning Organization
Stephen Haines
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About This Book
In an attempt to achieve high levels of growth, profit, and competitive advantage, American businesses have been implementing a variety of management initiatives, such as TQM, reengineering, service management, self-directed work teams, and empowerment. Too often, these initiatives, when implemented individually, fail or provide only short-term results. American industry is now realizing that no single initiative can provide an overall, long-term solution. A more comprehensive, integrated approach is necessary to sustain future success. Sustaining High Performance shows you how to develop and implement an integrative "systems-thinking" strategy that will ensure a successful long-term management plan.
Sustaining High Performance will help you reinvent your strategic management system (planning and change) for the 21st century and give you the tools and information to pull ahead of the competition and become a powerhouse organization.
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PART I REINVENTING STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: AN OVERVIEW
DOI: 10.4324/9781003077138-2
- Chapter 1 Revolutionary Change: Implications for Organizations
- Chapter 2 Yes... Ther Ar âRight Answersâ
- Chapter 3 The Organization: A Living, Breathing System
- Chapter 4 Reinventing Strategic Planning for the 21st Century
CHAPTER 1 REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR ORGANIZATIONS
DOI: 10.4324/9781003077138-3
The end of one century, and the beginning of another, ushers in a fundamental period of transition, a time in which we all must reshape our mental maps of the world.
One thing is certain: as we usher out the 20th century and rook forward to the third millennium, we are vulnerable to more multi-faceted, simultaneous changes than ever before. The revolutionary change we are experiencing in the last part of the 20th century presents some harsh realities against a backdrop of promising horizons.
This change seems to rush at us with mind-numbing speed, affecting our personal lives, our choice of careers, our workplace, our governing bodies, our natural environment, our entire world. To fully understand how it will affect us, and what will be required to deal with it, we must examine the nature and extent of this change.
ASTONISHING CHANGES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS
First, it is important to understand that literally everything which impacts our daily lives is in transition. Countries, governments, companies, technologies, industries, the workplaceâit would be difficult to imagine a more revolutionary period of change in both the geopolitical and business environments. Over the last decade, this unprecedented change has caused deep structural uprootings on a global basis.
The 1993 Joint Economic Summit of the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized democracies and Russiaâs Boris Yeltsin is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The leaders of Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany, and the United States traveled to the summit from nations that, while considered the strongest in the world, were in tremendous turmoil.
Gone were Bush (U.S.), Gorbachev (U.S.S.R.), and Mulrooney (Canada), victims of political upheavals of epic proportion. Japanâs Prime Minister Miyazawa came as a lame duck less than a week before his conservative Liberal Democratic Party was ousted in favor of a coalition consisting of younger, more independent political contenders. Franceâs President Mitterrand had just been forced by voters to team up with a prime minister of the opposition power, while Italyâs government was caught in an all-out war on the centuries-old Mafia infiltration into its political system.
Add to this the astonishing changes of the past several years, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the formation of the European Economic Common Market, and the toppling of communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, the Asian âtiger countriesâ and Chinaâs Communist mandarins appear to be mounting a campaign toward free markets, and Japanâs keiretsus (interlocking companies with cross-ownership and financial, social, directorate links) are gaining in global strength.
All of this, and more, has a direct impact on the world economy. Former Eastern bloc countries are selling more manufactured goods to nations that were previously considered enemies, foreign investments in emerging Third World countries are causing rapid expansion of their economies, and Latin American dictatorships are veering toward the free market mindset.
Major U.S. corporationsâonce considered the strongest in the worldâare also undergoing fundamental changes. The list of unseated or seriously wounded leaders of Fortune 500 corporationsâAkers (IBM), Wang (Wang Corp.), Olson (D.E.C.), Stempel (General Motors), Brennan (Sears), Robinson (American Express), Lego (Westinghouse), Canion (Compaq), Reed (CitiCorp), Whitmore (Kodak), and Allen (Delta)âis legendary testament to this phenomenon of change.
The fiber of global business and industry has also changed dramatically. The breakup of AT&T, once a monopoly that virtually owned the U.S. communications business, gave rise to a number of smaller (but surprisingly tough) competitors that now appear to he in it for the long haul. The introduction of fax machines and cellular phones has greatly expanded the time and space range of our interpersonal communications and the communications industry. Fiber-optic cables positioned beneath the ocean floor and satellites in outer space have broken through previous limitations to provide instantaneous global communication.
During these past ten years, who would have predicted that innovations in the personal computer market would spawn desktop publishing, a self-propagating rival that threatens to turn the printing industry inside out. For all of these industrial and commercial innovations, however, there are just as many changes in the work force itself that must be acknowledged.
Corporations around the globe have had to address cultural diversity, communication, and training barriers as they manage a more diverse work force. Immigrants, racial minorities, women, and disabled workers, once a relatively small part of the work force, are now entering the workplace in burgeoning numbers. Another group that is being heard from more and more lately are the senior members of the workplace. Older workers who once chose early or mid-60s retirement have recently started to demand longer and more flexible work options or part-time re-entry into the workplace.
In addition to the changing demographics of the work force, organizations are also facing radical paradigm shifts in employee values and expectations. As the hierarchical structure of organizations gives way to a more democratized workplace, employees have become more empowered and are seeking more active participation in the outcomes of their organizations. Teamwork has become a standard part of organizational frameworks, which has led to an increase in individual creativity and autonomy.
Jobs themselves are changing as organizations downsize and right-size. More and more telecommuting jobs and consulting needs are being created to fill the gaps caused by permanent layoffs, even among middle-management jobs, which are now obsolete and have been eliminated. Further, the spiritual and religious profile of the United States is undergoing a massive facelift away from traditional or mainstream religion. Even nuns and agnostics are now on the hoard of the National Conference of Christians and Jews as the Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims take their new place as mainstream.
The public sector has also been in a state of metamorphosis over the past few years. Public resources are maxed out as global economies decline or integrate, yet the demands of the welfare state steadily increase. Also, as more and more governing bodies once based on socialism turn toward privatization and free enterprise, the lines between public and private organizations are becoming blurred. As a result, the public sectorâfrom the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., to California, Oregon, Alberta, and Saskatchewanâfinds itself needing to reorganize its services for greater efficiency and accountability.
This environment is also requiring the public and not-for-profit sectors to employ more business and market approaches. In effect, these sectors are undergoing an entrepreneurial renaissance in which such tactics as user pay, competition, privatization, and site-based management are becoming the standard rather than the exception. It is truly a renaissance whose time has come, as witnessed by the growing trends of decentralized authority, market-based incentives, preventing problems (versus curing crises), customer focus, and empowering communities to be proactive in solving their own problems.
This is clearly a time in which both the workplace and those in it are realizing enormous, life-altering change. In addition to the influence of corporate mergers and acquisitions so prevalent in the 1980s, todayâs organizations now face enormous global competition in production and financing and must learn to function in a much more deregulated environment.
ANTICIPATED CHANGES IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS
It is unrelentingly clear that the last ten years have produced fundamental upheavals in global leadership, marketplaces, and individual values. What is also becoming alarmingly clear is that the next ten years will bring even more change than the past ten years. Not only is our environment experiencing tremendous change; the rate of that change has virtually doubled. The changes we are dealing with today are happening at such a high rate of speed that the changes of the past ten years are essentially the equivalent of the previous twenty years, a disquieting thought at best.
The rapid waning of socialism around the globe will continue to bring a steady stream of change to the world economy. As more and more borders open up, from Eastern Europe to Mexico to Indonesia, numerous free trading blocs are developing. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico and the United States will further integrate our economies. It will dramatically impact future trade and create social change within North and South America as well, despite initial peso devaluations.
Previously unheard of regional affiliations are also entering the global trade market, particularly in Latin America, where such groups as Mercosur (a common market in the works between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay), the Andean Group, the Central American Common Market, the Mexico-Chile Free Trade Agreement, and the G3 Agreement between Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela are rapidly gaining strength. By the end of the 1990s, it is expected that the six-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations will formulate a common market. In all, the overriding trend in trade is from nationalism to globalization.
Nationalism and fragmentation are on the rise in countries all over the globe as well. In North America, Quebec is seriously pushing for a form of secession from Canada. Ex-Soviet countries, Yugoslavia, and Czech-Slovakia are experiencing ongoing chaos; with their combustible nationalism, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are not faring much better. Africaâs turbulent politics of the past several decades shows no sign of resolution (consider Rwanda). Only in South Africa is real change toward equality occurring.
Most futurists agree that technology is often the driving force of change, and the next ten years of technological growth will do nothing to disprove that theory. Continuing changes in robotics, automation, mechatronics (microprocessing within products), computer-assisted design (CAD), computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM), computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), and graphical user interface (GUI) are expected to redefine industrialized manufacturing.
In addition, massively parallel proce...