Author: Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles

Publisher: Authors Choice Press

Pub. in: August, 2003

ISBN: 0595291139

Pages: 276

Measurements: 9 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BA00516

Other information:  

The nautre of organizational behavior (really individual behavior within the constraints imposed by organizational culture) is to seek incrementalist changes at the margins. Rarely do the well-entrenched want to leave those trenches to risk what they have in the fluidity of the uncretain. This is natural, since safety is something innately sought by most organisms most of the time. Short-term safety can be a good predictor of impending decline and death, as the old adage says: "Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give 40 Years of Success."

The authors propose that aiming for incremental, marginalist change is a "stall," a way of refusing to face or accept the need for real change. (Sometimes, the need for change can be misread or mismeasured, with New Coke being an example they give.) The authors offer a number of vingettes designed to illustrate "stallbuster" tactics that will impel the desired-for change. These vingettes are bite-sized case studies of how real-world organizations approached (or failed to approach) problems, and the results of their actions. These are compared, in terms of implicit values, with the formal values each company had adopted. The actioning of these values provides insight into where disconnects between policy and performance occur, with McDonalds' response to the infamous hot-coffee lawsuit and Odwalla's in dealing with food-poisoning problems being one example. Each company's colture at least partly pre-deter- mines the range of responses that their leaders can imagine, with a corresponding range of predictable results.

In the tradition of Dr. Kurt Lewin (Field Theory in the Social Sciences) the authors propose that breaking through stall-tactics requires more than a circumstantial, piecemeal approach: unfreezing organizational behavior ("stallbusters") and shifting focus to enable lock-in (for however short- or long-term fluid circumstances dictate)of more adaptive actions. This is a key to breaking out of the prepare-to-win-the-last war mentality, as well as the incrementalist mindset that curses mature firms in the cash-cow stage of growth, before radical change to survive drastic environmental shifts carries a Phyrric price for survival.

Measurement is an area of continuing focus: What we measure becomes how we measure success. Rejecting or supplanting traditional measure- ment concepts may be necessary so as to allow truly pertinent data to be collected. (One anecdote deals with a company priding itself on a 1% error rate for each process - without anyone recognizing that errors are cumulative, resulting in 80% of its' customers experiencing some form of product failure.) Time is one of the things that Mitchell and Coles believe has to be measured - especially in the more-nebulous disciplines, like financial analysis, where productivity has been more difficult to quantify. If outputs are hard to measure, them time spent on various tasks can show how much of a workday was productive, even if unquantifiable.

This work is not a by-the-numbers, how-to workbook with checklists. It should not be read that way. It is rather more Aesop-like, in that it uses stories to illuminate a few key points, which are them discussed in terms of broader application. Read as intended, this book can help to exercise the imagination of leaders who want to leave corporate Darwinism behind for radical mutation in a world loosed from its' fixed reference points by technological breakthroughs, geopolitical flux, demographic shifts, and culture-shock: In other words, the search for a 2,000 percent solution.

(From quoting Lioyd Conway, USA)

Target readers: Executives, Managers, Entrepreneurs, Professionals, Consultants, Academics and MBAs.

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