"KOKORO"
«Kokoro, in Japanese literally means Heart. But in the East, the words or rather their symbols or characters generally appeal to a much broader concept than what their literal translation indicates. That is why when you hear that a Japanese businessman tells you about the "Kokoro of your Organization" you are actually telling him about the soul (in an emotional sense), the spirit, the value, the resolution, the feeling, the affections, the intimate sense, the BEING of your company, something similar to what we in the West call: the heart of things. »
Precisely to that place, at the heart of your Organization and your management as Manager, I invite you to travel together throughout this meeting.
risking-the-present-to-achieve-a-powerful-futureThe central idea on which I propose to talk to you and ask for your opinion is this:
What am I referring to when I say "Risking the Present". Plain and simple to abandon that comfort space in which many managers and organizations settle, lighting the autopilot, until some emergency makes them re-activate. Paradoxically, it is also abandoning the space of discomfort generated by the chronic distress that affects managers and organizations when the emergency becomes a habitual context. (Any similarity with the situation of a country in southern Latin America is pure coincidence)
What I am referring to when I say "Achieve a Powerful Future". I am talking about an idealized future, where the “ideal” is exactly what you and the organization want to achieve.
That future in which you and / or the creators of your organization dreamed when they declared the Vision of the Company. That future that needs someone to declare it as possible !!! That space that appears when leaders declare it as a possibility and the organization chooses to assume it as its own commitment.
A Powerful Future was the place where Tomás Alva Edison stood when he declared the existence of an energy fort possible that would improve the quality of life of people, allowing them to light up the darkness. It was also the declaration that made the Vision of John F. Kennedy a reality when in 1963 he declared that the Americans in 1969 would tread on the lunar soil and the world could see how our Planet Earth is observed from the Moon.
A Mighty Future is not a place we can go to one day try to get there. It is in my opinion almost the exact opposite. In other words, a Powerful Future is our Vision of the Future declared in the Present. It is our declaration of the future from which we come to complete in the present what we are lacking for the Vision to become a reality.
For Edison, not achieving the electric light bulb was not a possibility. Edison did not try. Did. When more than once in the many reports they made him they asked him "how did he maintain his perseverance, having failed 138 times (recorded) in his attempts to create the electric light bulb". Edison patiently replied, “I never tried or failed. Throughout the process alone, I found 138 ways not to make the light bulb. The only possibility that I would not complete my vision would have been to die before making it come true, and yet rest assured that someone would have continued my Vision. ”
Now understand why I'm proposing that we talk about Kororo. In my opinion, the essence of the achievement of a person or an organization is precisely in their BEING, not in their doing, not in their having. I believe that what is essential is not what we do or have, but who we are as managers or as an organization, to achieve the results we are achieving.
THE TRANSPARENT “TRAP” OF CHANGE
Throughout the 90s, some multinationals such as Enrón, Andersen, Kodak, IBM, American Express and General Motors changed their CEOs. All of them were front-line executives, with recognized expertise, an undeniable capacity for action, in some cases with impressive performances. The common denominator among all of them was that they promised to reverse the situation in which the companies found themselves, for which the most notable Head Hunters in the business world had managed to capture them, almost always in the figure of firefighters / rescuers, from an extreme business situation.. Another interesting pattern is for all these CEOs. they faced furious restructuring, including drastic downsizing and reengineering programs in line with their respective promises of Change.
History shows that most of these efforts managed to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve companies' profits at some points, at least for a time. However, even with these cyclopean efforts, a furious activity and not a few "finados" along the way, the competitive capacity of these companies at some point entered a downward spiral, in some cases declining to the point of entrepreneurial failure, even before that finally the respective Directories and / or Audits perceived the urgent and essential need to intervene.
The first question that arises is What happened? Where did they fail? Where, of course, were the CEOs wrong? One of the first simplistic responses that appeared in the speech of the Directors themselves, of many consultants and of some "gurus" was "Leadership". "The problem has been the lack of Leadership" was in fact one of the most listened to phrases. Almost as if Boards of Directors and Boards of Directors had agreed, the “blame” for everything rested on those same CEOs. that until not long ago were expected with the same expectation as Batman in Gotham City.
"What could we do if we called Batman and they finally sent us to the Guazón", more than one Director probably thought. The general discourse focused on explaining what happened as a consequence of poor leadership and an incorrect strategic vision.
Now, when in some cases it was possible to delve a little beyond the first simplistic explanations, both to Directors and Directors and even to several of the CEOs themselves, asking them for a more extensive review of the process and its results, excuses and explanations immediately appeared laden with babbling about why things hadn't worked out the way they should have.
In many cases the blame was transferred through the magical recourse of a typical defensive routine, from the CEO downwards, with the classic statement, "I dictated the correct strategy but these people did not know how to implement it" and sometimes upwards with the sentence " Heh !, the same Directors who today ask me to leave, are the ones who did not let me make the Changes that would have corrected the situation, ” and who knows how many statements more or less similar to these. In some cases including some rather confusing attempt to justify what happened from a kind of revealed revelation that the answer lies much deeper than what the Board and even CEOs themselves are trained to see.
In my opinion one possibility is that both CEOs. As Directors, they define the problem as “lack or poverty of leadership” since they see the solution only from the need for a “Change”.
And from that point of view they are also likely to ensure that any self-respecting leader should be able to implement the Shift.. From this point of view, I fully agree with them. If we take the history of the 80's as a basis, it is logical to think that each CEO should know how to create functional groups of tasks, minimize defects and redesign production processes and manage businesses by reducing costs and improving performance. Let's also say that if we spice this specialization with a bit of Strategic Planning, Quality of service and Consumer Satisfaction, we would have a CEO to play first and obviously the one that does not meet these expectations, does not set new goals and objectives attractive enough and that he is not capable of leaving the hide in the company to achieve them, he cannot call himself a leader and therefore does not deserve to be at the head of an organization.
So, if the CEOs of the mentioned multinationals did have all the necessary capacities described; What happened that the results they obtained in the medium and long term were the main cause of their failure?
In my opinion, the answer is in the subtitle: "the transparent trap of change." Transparent because it is a trap that we put in our own actions, only in function of the Change. Transparent because we don't see it, just like the air we breathe. And cheating, because just where logic tells us that we could feed ourselves to change, the trap catches us, leaving us immobilized and often not knowing what to do, in the face of a gap between the expected and the obtained results, of such magnitude, that most of the time it does not resist explanation.
WHAT IF, INSTEAD OF THINKING ONLY OF “CHANGE”, WE TALK ABOUT
“RE-INVENTING US AS MANAGERS AND AS AN ORGANIZATION”
Change Management, Rezising, Reengineering, and some etc. more they are to my way of seeing, Change Programs that deal with the symptoms, losing sight of the underlying causes that generate the results in the Organizations.
Hence, I think that all the admirable efforts that CEOs or Managers make in companies, often groping for a "strategic solution, a tactical recomposition, achieve a new twist, some new form of leadership, along with many others Attempts made with the best of intentions, without achieving the expected results, end up frustrating the "most painted".
These Organizations and these Managers are operating “trapped” within the “more of the same” Paradigm. And within this paradigm, the action of incremental Change only generates results that are a little greater or a little less than what already existed. With the addition that like any system tends to its own rebalancing, the pressure that is exerted trying to change generates an inversely proportional reaction, which with the force of a tidal drift, in the medium term returns everything to its previous position. Hence, many times it arises as a distinction in the corridors of organizations, "we are always talking about change and in the end we never manage to change."
The problem is that the pressure of change is not strong enough to take care of itself. On the other hand, incrementally increasing the pressure for the change to occur, only causes the resistance to increase proportionally. This is where the appearance of "managerial or organizational paralysis" appears. There is always a "momentum" in which the momentum of the change opposed to the force of the drift to not change, are equalized. Then, little by little, the momentum loosens its capacity to resist such a degree of tension and finally the system recovers its initial equilibrium point.
This type of Organizations and / or Managers what they really need is not "trying to change", simply with much less effort they can choose to "re-create themselves from their own reinvention capacity". This is reinventing the System, breaking the Paradigm of more of them and choosing another paradigm (since we will always be in one), that has the design that we want and is really functional to the results that we want to achieve.
Reinventing is not Changing what already is. It is creating what IS NOT yet. Let's take an example. A butterfly is not a Gusanote, or an incrementally improved worm. A butterfly is a totally different creature from its own origin as a Worm. This is truly a Transformation process.
THE ANALOGY OF ICEBERG AND ORGANIZATIONS "The TITANIC effect"
An image is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. And that has been the objective for which together with Dr. José Luis Revah, we have developed the analog model between an Iceberg and an Organization, coupling in turn, the example of cognitive blindness that for us covers practically all possibilities, options and powers to make mistakes, due to a totally biased view of a System brought out by an entire management team, for somehow calling the entire crew of the “world's largest and safest pleasure cruiser ever built, “ THE TITANIC ”.
Many times we have heard that to be successful "you have to be and seem." In the context of business organizations and fundamentally in pyramid hierarchies, many times, the concept is inverted, not a few cases or organizations in which people are much more concerned with "appearing" than with "being".
This is where the one that we have nominated as the “TITANIC” effect appears, defined in this way, by the explosive combination of assumptions, prejudices, beliefs and mental models that produced one of the most recognized contemporary catastrophes.
Overcoming the distances, which after a brief analysis, we will see that there are not so many, what happened to the Titanic, usually happens today, to many Managers and as a whole to different organizations, when they lose sight of the Paradigm from which they are operating and they are also blind to the way they are relating to their environment.
What then was the Paradigm from which those responsible for the Titanic operated: "This is the largest ocean liner in the world !!!", "It is unsinkable !!!", "It is built with the latest technical advances and prepared to be the most speedy !!! ”,“ It is the most luxurious cruise ship on the entire planet !!! ”,“ It is so sure that it does not need my attention –the captain- “etc, etc, etc….. From these assumptions, collectively reaffirmed and agreed, the appearance of symptoms and signs that were not in line with those beliefs, were totally ignored, blinding the protagonists to other possibilities or events, whose probability of occurrence did not fit into that paradigm and therefore nobody wanted to include them in his vision of reality.
If we apply this same Paradigm to the business context, we will be able to see, as the illustration shows, what is happening in everyday life, when in the daily action of the operation of an organization, we are only operating with a vision limited to 20% of reality, visualizing only the part of the Iceberg that is above the “waterline” (Paradigm line) losing access to the other
Remaining 80%, which is the space in which the "conversations" are generated, which produce the results on sight.
That 80% is where the System's leverage points are. This is where the conversations are generated that, based on the judgments, opinions, beliefs, uses, customs and habits, will make possible or limit relationships oriented to the coordination of actions that produce the expected results.
How then can the Leader of an Organization, and his own agents, intervene to achieve the Results that are proposed, both individually and collectively, based on the way in which he relates to this Paradigm and access to a new Vision of reality. In this context, then, it is important to perceive the possible “contact points” or “moments of truth”, constituted by the “meeting” between the members of the Organization with each other (internal client) and simultaneously, between any member of the organization and the external client.
When the “contact” occurs in the visible fringe of the Iceberg (20%), the Opinion Published, the measurable and opinionable Results, the direct and modifiable relationship at the moment with the protagonists themselves appear. This is the strip of Tasks and Results. Strip in which traditional management usually operates.
But when, as in the case of the Titanic, contact occurs in the submerged fringe of the Iceberg (80%), which happens much more frequently than the one that the Paradigm allows to visualize, the results do not appear at the same time, being this "gap" in time, which prevents us from seeing the operation of the System with an adequate-focus.
In this "blindness space", below the water level, is where the essence of the CULTURE of the ORGANIZATION is generated, where an adequate "coordination of actions is produced or not, where prejudices, beliefs and histories are generated that make things happen as they do ”, achieving or not achieving the expected results.
We are now at the heart of the problem and on the threshold of access to a new vision. In the visible 20% is where our “LOOK” is located. In the 80% submerged is where our true “BEING” lives, either as individuals or as an organization.
So let's think, online, about the Results we want to obtain:
What do we want to achieve and who are we being, in the relationship, when the CLIENT, internal or external, comes into contact with our "IMAGE" as opposed to when he makes contact with our "ESSENCE or IDENTITY"?
What happens when the coherence between the "PUBLIC ACT or IMAGE" and that "ESSENCE or TRUE BEING" that constitute our identity is broken?
We are building a fictitious relationship, between Directors, Bosses and Professionals, and simultaneously between them and the clients, in which each one thinks and believes, which has the power to make the other see a reality different from the one both are living.
This is how "clients are lost", "power is lost", possibilities are closed "and consequently, the expected results are not achieved.
If, obviously, this is not what you want; why then, we see that this situation is repeated, every day in the business reality of our country.
The reason is precisely our limited vision of the Paradigm. We believe that people do not realize it, that they do not perceive the important gap that exists between what we SAY or APPEAR and what we really ARE and consequently DO.
There is a latent fear of "lowering" the water line (Paradigm line) before the possibility of being exposed in our supposed weaknesses.
This situation has a solution and it is possible to really achieve the results that a business organization wants to achieve. For this, it is essential to operate in the submerged strip. This is where conversations can be changed, mental models can be revised, filters of attitudes and beliefs can be modified, and only since the creation of a new Paradigm, a new RELATION, genuine and authentic, sustained on the pillars of Integrity, Honesty, Responsibility and Commitment, between people and with oneself.
From then on, it will be possible to establish the coordination of necessary actions, so that the Organization as a whole makes a real TRANSFORMATION possible, aimed at reinventing a new Corporate Culture for the Corporation.
SOME KNOWN EXAMPLES
I consider it important to point out that I have chosen as examples for this writing cases of well-known companies, for their global insertion, including their subsidiaries in Argentina. However, taking advantage of my experiences in the '80s and' 90s from the Inmark International consultancy, whose European headquarters allowed me to coexist and investigate with cases of global companies, I have also particularized on companies from the USA and Europe, with all the intention that Argentine managers who share this reading, can observe that the problem of Paradigms, not exclusive to our country. Everywhere beans are cooked.
When British Airways became the world's favorite airline in the 1980s, it faced the challenge of becoming a different company, not just a better company. The same thing happened with Europcar when it decided to become the friendliest and most efficient car rental company in Europe and not just a ubiquitous one. And when Haagen-Dazs chose to visit their ice cream shops in Europe as an exciting event, the company not only needed to change what it did or how it did the job.
Incremental change is not useless. It's just not enough. Many companies do not need to change what they already are. They need to create what they are not. A possible process for this is reinvention.
Obviously the immediate question could be: Yes, okay. Let's reinvent ourselves. But when and how is a reinvention done ???
The first question, the When ?, obviously does not have a definitive answer. There is no standardized when. Despite the known experiences we can obtain some clues.
The “momentum” in which the need to break the paradigm in which we are operating tends to emerge as an eruption is usually preceded by a very high degree of organizational and punctually managerial distress, starting from the paradoxical overlapping of the two basic tensions for the Instead, you view these as triggers for a possible reinvention choice.
These are, the Tension of Change 1, in which we ask ourselves: "What will happen to us if we do not change" and simultaneously the Tension of Change 2, in which we also ask ourselves: "What will happen to us if we change".
Based on these two questions that generate a high degree of uncertainty, the first conversations are usually opened for the possible “transformation”. From this moment, the ability to carry out the process, both by the Managers and by all the members of the Organization, will determine if the transformation is from Worm to Butterfly or from Vesuvius to Archaeological Remains.
Regarding the second question we asked ourselves, the How, in my opinion, implies some requirements to be considered:
The first requirement in this case for you as a Manager , is that you see the possibility to choose for yourself “ Be the Context” suitable to allow people to design the “conversation network” for the possibility, for the commitment, for the learning., for creativity, for new conversations and also for self-reinvention, which will lead to a possible transformation.
In order to BE this context that will open new spaces for the coordination of effective actions, it is necessary in the first instance that you as manager become involved in the process from the very possibility of re-creating your "being" in the Organization. Nothing more and nothing less than reviewing your personal "Kokoro". I'm not saying CREATE a context, since this would mean that we are creating something outside of ourselves, as if it were for others. And the idea of "BEING THE CONTEXT" is precisely to face an internal process of personal transformation that appears in action, manifesting itself immediately in the Quality of Interpersonal Relationships, which you are capable of achieving.
In this aspect, I maintain that the level of excellence that we declare to have regarding our Quality of Life, in all the domains of our existence - work, social, family, etc. - will always be directly proportional to the Quality of human relationships that we are. able to create.
To face this process of verifying Who we are being as Observers of reality, let us remember in principle that as human beings we are biologically limited. By this I mean that our own human condition limits us to see reality. We are only Observers of a reality, in whose creation we ourselves are putting our own, at the moment of observing. In this way, our beliefs not only determine how we interpret the world, but how we act and relate to it. It is important to keep in mind that, people do not always behave in accordance with what we propose, but yes, in consistency with what we believe and what we feel - our Kokoropersonal-. For example, if we believe that a person is not trustworthy, we act consistently with that, even if we say otherwise. Similarly when we declare that "something is possible" and choose to commit ourselves to that result, we finally achieve it.
80% of the time we are awake, we are in a conversation, generally self-referential in which we are relating to ourselves (My Self). Almost always "talking" with ourselves. According to how this "internal dialogue or this conversation" (positive, facilitating, joyous, limiting, sad, negative) will be the state of mind that we will be generating as a context for our actions and relationships.
The possibility of intervening on our mental models and beliefs (detecting, verifying and modifying them) generates a greater range of possibilities for action, allows us to be more assertive and have a better focused image of our current reality and fundamentally gives us access to intervene to change our own paradigms and mental models, if we choose to do so.
The second requirement for an Organization that chooses to reinvent itself is the REVIEW80% of the Iceberg, which is below the level of the waters, out of our sight and that is constituted as the set of mental models, underlying assumptions and the premises that in transparency, are making support and support of its forms to do things and from which they make their decisions and define their actions. This is our own context that we do not see because we are within it. It is the soup, which we cannot see since we are one of the "noodles" that is floating in it, comfortably and warm with the almost ideal temperature. And of course this is almost our death certificate: Remember that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water the frog will manage to jump out and somehow get out. But put it in the still cold water, light the fire and the frog will cook.Although it is difficult for us to recognize it, the same thing happens to us in most of the Organizations.
In the case of an Organization, we consider that the final product will be, rather than the sum, rather a combination or functional mix, of all the individual models, sometimes combined and others mixed or entangled with each other, each and every one of the agents that make up the Organization.
In this product, which, on the other hand, far from being a final product, is subject to permanent modifications, they appear shaping the organizational context, all the conclusions, myths, legends, stories, inconvertible, undeniable, values and structures that the conversational network of the company has been building as a cultural support. Here lies hidden and transparent the strength of the drift, sustained over time as a product of lived experiences and interpretations of the past, generating for the Organization a "historically determined future", which is metaphorically speaking nothing more and nothing less than the "Stocks" that keeps her trapped in the paradigm of "more of the same".
The third requirement is the Choice. In my opinion, there is not the slightest possibility that a process of Reinvention or Recreation can be carried out, without it being chosen by its own protagonists.
Every attempt to force the process from the classic strategic conception declared out loud by the enlightened on duty (Directors, CEOs, Consultants, Gurus, etc.) about that "We have found the solution !!! This Organization MUST change. They must reinvent themselves. They HAVE to recreate themselves, because otherwise they will succumb ” Of course, said with a serious voice and an expression of circumstance, typical of those who have been able to access, even if not for a moment in their professional life, the“ Revealed Truth ”.
I maintain that no person and no Organization MUST or HAVE that …….. absolutely nothing. Add what occurs to the ellipsis. It does not matter. Total, as soon as the Manager or the Organization, or his son, or his wife, or his domestic worker, hear that they MUST or HAVE to do what you order them, or that it is essential for their survival and, moreover, that which It will assure you the greatest success in your life, automatically you will be able to observe in them and if you risk a little bit in yourself also, the following "protective symptoms":
Possibility that your interlocutor shoots a virtuous speech with declarations of "total agreement with his theory". Something equivalent to what in the purest Creole we love to hear: “You know you're right, Boss!
Possible manifestations of immediate visualization in the action, totally consistent with what you have just indicated as necessary actions with the "must-have", whose timing of possible duration in the actions of "the other" will be in a very optimistic view will be 24/48 hours. Realistic ½ day. Probable, until you stop having it in sight.
Automatic shooting in total and absolute transparency of the entire "Defensive Routines battery" that who "should or would have", has as artillery in their background. These routines rarely appear openly manifested, in general they remain hidden in the Left Column of the thought of their interlocutor, who with a repetitive "nod of his head", a "friendly and sometimes compassionate look of understanding" more than any other "correct, yes, uh-huh, while you continue prescribing the "should or would", the person is thinking…
- Yes, but…..; It would be fantastic….. for other organizations it could be; Hmm, what a good idea !!!…. do you think it will work?….; Right, that is what we have to do… We will try it !! Yes, the idea is good, but it won't work here…. Yes, of course, count on me. (Brother, this is your war, don't count on me). And you? Why don't you start first… Or does the leader not have to set an example for me? Heh, heh, heh, today I obey you. So I should… Someday I'm going to collect it !!!
Let us keep in mind that whether we intend to achieve modifications in individual or group behaviors, neither PRESSURE nor TENSION will be the appropriate paths.
Both generate immediate resistance. The first, the Pressure, depending on the size of the exhaust valve that the person or organization finds, will take more or less time to “explode”.
The second, the TensionIt generates an initial streching that often gives us the false image of having reached a CENIT of unusual results. If you want to know what is going to happen immediately after, do the test right now with an elastic band. Stretch it to the best of your ability. Take the risk to achieve the greatest possible extension, which you. of course you don't have the slightest idea what the limit is and then if it didn't cut and it went off go find out where, notice what happens when you release it from the end with which it reached the maximum point. He could see it. You probably felt it on your finger too. I hope not in your eye. The band does not return to its starting position. On the contrary, the reactive effect is so violent that it contracts below its initial stable tension. Okay,Imagine now what will happen to "the Band" of which you are part of your role as conductor.
The Fourth Requirement is to visualize the conversational network that constitutes the Organization in which we operate from the angle of Systems Dynamics in order to determine the leverage points that will become the best possible spaces for intervention.
In this way, at the design stage of an intervention in an organization, it is important to clearly define the spaces or leverage points of the “company system” on which we will carry out specific actions and which will in fact be affected. At the same time, we can also foresee the areas where the results will appear manifested in the action.
First, it seems that every intervention aims to generate appreciable results in the visible task that the organization carries out. That is, in its public part. The first area that tends to change, then, is the 20% band where tasks and results are located.
In general, all traditional reengineering processes aim to intervene in this space. Organizations are concerned with improving the way they do their work. This improvement is then measured in terms of productivity, decrease in costs, decrease in quality failures, etc. As CEOs have been required in the 1990s for the examples mentioned above.
However, we say that if only the results are measured in the task space, we are remaining blind to a phenomenon that, due to its impact on it, claims to be taken into consideration. In general, when designing Business Process Reengineering, we point to the most obvious or obvious space in which we want to generate results, that is, we seek to directly modify the task, without considering that it (which is aimed at achieving a product) is in turn the product of other processes less obvious or less visible to the naked eye.
By removing these underlying processes from transparency, also measuring the result of our actions on them, it is possible to modify the quality of the work, intervening in its deepest causes. In this way, the spaces for management intervention are expanded, discovering points of high leverage power within the system that represents the organization.
The most important of these processes, in our opinion, focuses on the quality of the relationships or interactions that people in the organization are capable of having and sustaining since all joint work implies the need to maintain relationships with many other people, those who play they occupy different roles in the company system: clients, suppliers, employees, bosses, managers, shareholders, etc.
These relationships are by no means innocuous and innocent, in terms of the quality of the actions that we are capable of generating jointly, and will undoubtedly be an essential condition in the quality of the task and of the final product.
On the other hand, these relationships are directly affected by another process, with very deep roots, that has to do with the individual identity of each of the people who make up the system. This area of concern, which we often call the self (in English is called the self), contains everything that makes the quality of the individual person, the individual who as such is part of a system that contains, encompasses and exceeds it. This self dramatically influences the quality of interactions that the person is able to maintain with other individuals.
Consequently, we can say that the task or work turns out to be the product, the visible part, of a process made up of the quality of the interactions and the quality of the individual people who participate in the organization.
Thus, the task turns out to be like the tip of the iceberg, the more you see of it, proportionally more mass is submerged.
THE CHALLENGE OF REINVENTION
Unless managers orchestrate the creation of a new context, all organizations are doing things to improve their competitiveness - be it by improving service, accelerating new product development, or increasing manufacturing flexibility - which at least produces unproductive agitation. and at most a significant change of short duration.
If a company truly reinvents itself, if it alters its context, it not only has the means to alter culture and achieve unprecedented results in quality, service ratings, time cycles, market penetration, and ultimately its financial performance; You will also have the ability to sustain these improvements regardless of changes in the business environment.
One company that almost succeeded in reinventing itself is the Ford Motor Company, including its subsidiary in Argentina. From 1980 to 1982, Ford lost $ 3 billion. For 1986, its earnings far exceeded that of General Motors, which is much larger for the first time since 1920. By 1988, Ford's profits reached $ 5.3 trillion and the return on equity reached 26.3%. Its penetration in the United States market increased 5 points to 22%. The time to develop a new car decreased from 8 to 5 years. Quality, according to JD Power surveys, jumped from bottom to bottom with 25% to top with 10% of all cars sold in the United States. And the surveys and targeted groups of both wage earners and union members recorded dramatic changes in their income, administration,morale and loyalty to the company.
The key to these remarkable improvements…? Employees at all Ford plants, including our well-known "Pacheco," consistently reported that Ford had become a completely different company than it was 5 years ago. Ford left behind its past as a rigidly hierarchical and financially driven company where concern for quality and new products became the most sweeping priorities.
Ford's Organizational Reinvention proved to be successful. Unfortunately, the company's leaders at the time did not reinvent themselves along with it as revealed by not investing enough in the most important business. For this reason, sustaining the company's momentum in the 90's has become a challenge.
FEAR OF THE NEW vs. THE COMFORT OF THE HABITUAL
The Ford case, like many others that we could cite, both in Argentina and in the USA or Europe, ratifies a certain pattern that appears in management charts, when talking about the possibility of reinvention. Many managers and directors do not choose to take the risk. It would seem that trapped by the fears generated by the change, they do not have the courage or do not see the need to discard the context that they have created, even when everything indicates that even for themselves it is not functional.
Most executives who hear REINVENTION !!! They imagine something like a 2 Tn King Kong. they will have to face. Far from it, a process of personal and organizational reinvention is much more like an excursion into Jurasic Park. As Mort Meyerson the president of Ross Perot's systems organization put it: “The journey to reinvent yourself and your company is not as scary as they say; it is worse". “You take a step into the abyss from the conviction that the only way to compete in the long run is by being a totally different company. It is not a swim proposition or you sink, you have to learn to swim again ”.
As my friend Alberto Prado, owner of an Argentine company, who with a lot of waist is weathering our Creole economic Twister, says: “In Argentina, it is necessary to open your mind to the point that, in addition to questioning all the models that we are using so far, it is necessary to seriously consider acquiring the skills of the world-famous "Tactical Divers", those commandos of the Marines that bank what comes ". To which I would add that they also train to walk, run and jump with frog legs in the snow, given that, in my opinion, Reinvention implies giving us the possibility of breaking all self-imposed limits, creating a context of sustainability for " all terrain".
From the "fears" we discussed earlier, it should not surprise us, then, that many managers end up sinking into the transparency of their own context. After creating a context or being one's product, they either don't have the value - or they don't see the need to discard it. But in defense of them, it is easy to look for the root cause of the decline in competitiveness and not see it.
Let's consider this analogy. We have just inherited the office of our predecessor. Of course we do not know a peculiarity: All the lighting elements have bulbs that give a slightly bluish tint of light, instead of white or yellow light. Suddenly we discovered that we do not like how we feel in the environment and we quickly made the decision to invest in repairing and painting the walls, reupholstering the furniture and changing the carpets. It seems that we never get to what we really want, however we rationalized it saying that at least it improves with every thing we change. Then one day our daughter comes in and says, “Dad, why do you have a blue light in the office? Glup !! How?? Obviously the next morning all the bulbs will probably be switched to white light. Ergo, suddenly,everything we had fixed is out of order again.
Context is like the color of light, not objects in the office. Context colors everything in the corporation. More aptly, the context alters what we see, usually without being aware of it.
A widely used example is IBM, a company that has been doing things to objects in the room without changing the color of the light. IBM was at the forefront of employing the most advanced business techniques, such as looking for Sigma Quality 6 (3.4 defects per million units), power and reductions. But because IBM did not alter its context - IBM's way of controlling and predicting any aspect of the business - these change programs did not serve as steps in a powerful future.
Company leaders sought to instill a spirit of innovation that would move employees to take bold initiatives with new product ideas and customers. But the context in which it was handled made innovation at IBM idiotic. The context - always positive and hyperalzored - demanded that managers demonstrate five steps forward in the future course of any first step they wanted to take. Including of course in this the regional levels of invoicing. Taking local management in the 1990s as an example, it is easy to remember the regrettable episodes that generated the indiscriminate desperation to show quantitative results. Obviously, the years after the Banco Nación affair left managers with no desire to risk,and thereby assume that the company had become a far cry from what it could potentially be. Today, in my opinion, IBM is facing a new impetus for its reinvention in the local market, by the hand of a group of managers who decided not to accept the context that they themselves had allowed to be generated in "transparency".
A well-known example of a successful reinvention is that of Motorola. Throughout its nearly 65-year history, Motorola has repeatedly decided that a new future is at hand, first in car radios, then in television, electronics and semiconductors, and recently in microcomputers, cell phones, and paging radios.. Each turn has been marked by fundamentally altering the type of company Motorola was in order to compete in completely different industries. This involved a self-imposed cataclysm: selling successful but old businesses and taking big risks on new ones.
Facing these challenges, Motorola leaders realized the importance of context. Motorola was once a set of fiefdoms dominated by male engineers who mistakenly thought they had no worthy rival. But in the late 1970s CEO Robert Galvin acknowledged that the company - with an inward look - was not prepared to face the intensification of Japanese competition.
He forced everyone to confront quality problems, divisional limitations, and the Japanese threat. To do so, the company had to become self-questioning, looking outward, and much more humble. A healthy degree of self-criticism replaced the old sense of superiority. In 1989, a year before he left the CEO, Galvin challenged Motorola to become “the world's premier company” a vision that transcended the company's initial definition of being the best at making its products.
WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE POWER OF THE CONTEXT THAT WE "ARE", PROBABLY WE WILL CONTINUE TO BEAT THE HEAD AGAINST THE SAME WALL
"The World's Premier Company" seemed too vague to inspire a powerful new future, but as Motorola employees began to come up with the idea they were spurred on by the challenge of being the best in every facet of their business. The vision served as a reminder that the company must constantly challenge its sense of what's possible to resist the pull of habit and routine.
The paradigm of Doing for Doing
The most essential definition of Madness is to constantly repeat the same action, hoping to obtain a different result.
What are we lacking to break this paradigm? Let's see this parallelism that can help us. Scientists at the beginning of the century treated time as a constant, as already given. But physicists studying light (photons) found increasing experimental evidence that something was out of place. They held, however, to the ether wave light theory and its central premise that light was a variable. When Einstein speculated that the speed of light could be a constant, he was led to look elsewhere to find the variable that could account for the elasticity of the cosmos. Time was the only candidate. Einstein created an intellectual difficulty that forced him to look "out of the picture."His consideration of a new possibility launched him into an intellectual odyssey that led him to The Special and General Theory of Relativity revolutionizing the world of physics. He created a new context by looking at the universe.
Like time, for the physicists of the end of the century, doing is the assumed management constant. To handle something is to do something. Managers are promoted and selected based on their ability to get things done. But what if something else is the constant and do is a variable?
Like Einstein's thought experiment of traveling in a photon of light to see what the world would look like from that perspective, executives with mastery of reinvention should travel in this uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory, the territory of being. The being alters action, the context shapes thought and perception. When you fundamentally alter the context, the foundations on which people build their understanding of the world, actions are altered concomitantly.
The context sets the level; the being belongs whether the actor lives his part or only carries it. The organizations and the people in them are being something all the time. Sometimes we describe them as "conservative" or hard to change "or" resistant to change ". The problem is that in addition to casual generalizations, for the most part we focus on what we are doing and let the self stand on its own.
This may be because Westerners have few mental hooks or even words to venture into being. The Japanese establish the journey of life in terms of perfecting their inner nature or being. This is precisely what they call " Kokoro". Westerners, by contrast, value our progress into adulthood in terms of personal wealth or levels of achievement. For the Japanese, just doing things is meaningless unless one is able to become deeper and wiser along the way.
Many Western managers will no doubt say that all these matters of philosophical or worse, theological issues have little relevance to managers. But the being of the organization determines its context, its possibilities. Changes in context can only occur when there is a turn in being. Those who would be IBM innovators continued to act "appropriately" and "conservatively" not surprising at all that the risk-taking context that President and CEO John Akers wanted to create was never achieved.
Our difficulty in discerning what a business is, explains why so many corporate revitalization efforts have failed. The case of the renowned American stores Saks and Macys that have tried to counter or capture the magic of Nordstrom without success is famous. The Nordstrom way of being has allowed him to win in circumstances that appear impossible. For example, it was able to launch a successful expansion program in the Northeast of the United States when that region was plunged into a deep recession. The expansion helped Nordstrom become the leading department store in the country in terms of sales per square meter. Nordstrom now has 64 stores, annual sales of $ 42.89 billion, and 20% annual growth.
While the other chains may copy some of what Nordstrom is doing, they do not realize that Nordstrom is living up to its motto "Respond to Unreasonable Requests from your Customers." This way of being makes employees respond to the challenges that clients propose to them. Usually, serving these requests involves more than just a little more service. But occasionally it means delivering groceries over the phone at the airport to a customer who had an emergency trip, changing a customer's flat tire, or paying a customer for parking fees when the wrapping department went overboard.
Nordstrom promotes these actions by promoting its best employees, noting "heroic acts" and paying its salespeople entirely on commission for what they usually earn about double what they would earn at an opposing store. For those who are wild beasts selling, Nordstrom is nirvana. But the system separates those who cannot meet those high standards and selects those prepared to be what Nordstrom proposes.
Rivals struggling to stay high, have instituted enchanting in-house schools, issued missions, and bragged about the importance of customers and the value of service. Nordstrom has been copied into introducing commissions and incentives. They have loosened their refund policies. Without exception, these actions have failed to close the gap. The problem seems to be an understanding of what it means to respond to unreasonable customer demands. For many competing store sellers, it means the customer comes first, within reason. Customer demands must be met - unless they are ridiculous. But for Nordstrom, every ridiculous demand from a customer is an opportunity for an “heroic” act by an employee, an opportunity to expand the store's reputation. To compete with Nordstrom,Other stores have to turn “who they are” in relation to the customer, not just what they do for the customer.
Becoming our “being”, not just intellectual “aha” My God! It is more frequent than Eureka. The proof of the acid of this turn is given whether or not there is an intellectual or emotional start. Executives at Europcar, the second largest car rental company in Europe understand this phenomenon.
In January 1992, CEO Fredy Dellis investigated a competitive situation and did not like what he found. Although income was growing slowly, profits were plummeting. He estimated Europcar's cost of $ 13 to process each rental agreement (mostly handmade), compared to $ 1 at Hertz and Avis. Previous attempts at incremental improvement failed to close this gap. Much of the problem seemed to stem from the structure of the company. Europcar was built through acquisitions and was a loose federation of car rental companies across Europe, each convinced that they knew their own country. Worse yet, each country built its fiefdom and maintained its own operating system, and these incompatible systems could not cope with the increasing number of cross-border travelers.Europcar was a parish organization whose managers in each country were concerned with defending their national idiosyncrasies and their own yard.
Dellis' response was to initiate the Greenway Project, a plan to forge the entire operating system across Europe - how reservations were made, how rental operations flowed from departure to return, critical financial purchasing activities of fleets and utilization of fleets. But a company-wide system would have dramatically changed the way country units operated and threatened their nationalist identities. Lawsuits between each country's managers and the design team, whose members were drawn from each country's separate operations, put the project at risk.
But in early 1993 a small miracle happened when the 35 highest executives and the design team met in Nice, France. The design team had been invited to demonstrate the new system where they had a lot of momentum, with very little momentum from the more senior sponsors. But these managers, finally recognizing the importance of the Greenway project to reduce Europcar's structural costs to competitive levels, took on the task of bridging this sea of mistrust and misunderstanding.
As managers moved through the design team's presentations on the components of the operating system and what it could achieve in terms of reducing costs and improving service and utilization of the fleet, the discussion became lively and engaging. much enrichment. Participants say the disbelief and remoteness felt by both designers and managers turned into growing excitement about new possibilities for the flow of information across the company. Furthermore, uniting all operations, the whole would be more formidable than the regrouping of the individuals. The antagonism that had marked the relationship between the parts of the company began to disappear, everyone in the meeting began to behave as part of a team.The turn for Europcar to become a company that could reinvent itself by going beyond geographical borders and hierarchy levels to become an innovator in its field, had begun.
Inventing a Powerful Future
The statements of the vision by managers have impressed and even amused employees who simply do not grasp why a CEO would describe a future that their experience says can never materialize. The implementation of action plans is inevitably built on the company's notions of how things really work around here and the employees' experience of the latest attempt at change. It all adds up to pull the tremendous past into a future that never seems within reach.
As we have said, reinvention involves creating a new possibility for the future, one that past experience and current predictions would indicate is impossible. Sir Collin Marshall did this by declaring that British Airways would be "the world's favorite airline" when it ranked among the worst. Before his return in the 1980s, frequent maintenance delays, poor food, and Aeroflot-like service standards - had inspired long-suffering customers to say that the English initials meant "pretty awful."
A statement from a leader generates an essential element of reinvention. It creates the possibility of a new future that evokes a general interest and commitment. When a statement is well posed, it is visually imaginable (becoming the world's favorite airline). The statement becomes the magnetic pole, the focus. In contrast, a vision provides a more elaborate description of the desired state and the yardstick against which success will be measured.
A statement forces you to step into the new future, to take a series of steps not in order to become the world's favorite line someday, but to be that airline now. Sir Colin began driving British Airways down that road, approaching those who were dealing closely with customers and asking what needed to happen. Responses included everything from making sure the terminal lights were always on to making sure meals on short trips were easy to unwrap and deliver. Being the best in the customer's eyes also meant putting the operation of the line under the marketing department, so that instead of moving people like packages, all operational decisions could start from a concern for the passenger.British Airways service is currently rated among the best and is one of the world's highest-profit airlines.
But what happens when a company reaches its future? Where do you go from there? This was what Haagen-Dazs faced after its extraordinary success in exporting its 'Dedicated to Pleasure' brand identity to the entire European market in 1989. A team of young and thriving recruits from food product companies thought it would take them from 3 to 5 years to gain presence in a market where competitors ranged from giants like Mars and Nestlé to thousands of boutiques with homemade recipes.
Against the designs, this team launched the brand in June 1989, with a daring advertising campaign manifested by scantily clad couples abandoning themselves to the delights of ice cream. In 18 months, Haagen-Dazs was the leading ice cream in Western Europe. The team had achieved one of the most successful product launches the food industry had ever seen.
Then something interesting began to happen. Once they achieved victory, the bureaucracy took over. The headquarters in Paris began to fight with the management teams of the different countries. Marketing began to flex its muscles at the expense of sales and store operations. Headquarters in the United States were too concerned about Ben & Jerry's meddling to notice anything. The brilliant young people in Europe began to imagine how to protect their position and more importantly what they could do to repeat themselves.
John Riccitiello, CEO of Haagen-Dazs International concluded that his organization had spent its future; incremental upgrades would not restore momentum. He played with embracing the ambitious goal of making Haagen-Dazs the premium food brand in Europe. But this goal appealed only to top managers, not everyone in the company.
Riccitiello decided to turn from the context of "beating the competition, being the best" and a strategy of selling pleasure to a new context of "celebrating the experience of being alive". He believed there would be more longevity in the future from selling excitement and pizzas. A visit to Haagen-Dazs would be a memorable event for clients.
This new future generated an important shift in personnel selection policies. Interviews with job candidates are currently more like theatrical auditions. "We are not just looking for people to clean tables and serve ice cream," says Riccitiello. “When a group of prospects comes in, we give them unexpected situations and see what they do. Do they add anything? Do they freeze and expect the correct answer from others? We ask that you play with 4 ice cream cones. We want our stores to be an event, a place where customers and employees celebrate the experience of something that tastes great and gives you - even just for a moment - a feeling that it's worth being alive. It has become our mission to provide that feeling.
In this way, HAAGEN-DAZS reinvented its future, declaring that being a customer in its businesses was genuinely a Memorable Experience, both for the customer and for its own employees.
To do this, the company created a high-level position. This “Director of Magic” as the woman who develops it has been appointed, works with managers and employees to help them generate ideas that make them see beyond their work. When coming to Haagen-Dazs becomes an exciting event for staff and clients, the competition has a hard time matching it.
Reinventing the Executive
During all the years that we have been applied to research, write, and carry out learning processes with Latin American, European and US companies, we have found, particularly in Top executives, a probable availability to rigorously and patiently review the mental paradigms and models on which your actions or your ideas settle. We often find senior executives high up as a threatened, evasive aristocracy with tacitly acquired rights and in many cases with a great deal of fear regarding a possible "dinosaur" disappearance.
Waves of restructuring or downsizing are desperate attempts by misunderstood heirs trying to slow down the fall of the big family. Each successive reaction is misinterpreted as a bold action to "put things in order."
When they think about the future and how to drive their cars, they usually come to a dichotomous crossroads. As they face the needs of their organization to reinvent themselves, many executives pray that it is for the best and choose to try some change, which they believe is the wisest course. Even though in some cases they see reinvention as a possibility, a cold sweat runs down their spine.
Thrown into territory unknown to them, where the steps along the way and the results themselves are often unpredictable, what happens to many managers is that they inadvertently fire their entire battery of defensive routines. They talk about change. They proclaim reinvention, Notwithstanding all their actions are aimed at retaking "control", believing of course that "control exists". They try by all means to put the whole situation back in "the box."
Hence we are not surprised then that so many Top executives decline the invitation to reinvent themselves and their organizations. This is like getting old; Experts tell us it is difficult, yet most of us hope to get through it painlessly. There is another choice, but it requires the reinvention of the executive, a series of questions about himself as leader. This is not a psychological process to compose something that is wrong, without an exploration that reveals the context from which the executive makes his decisions. People have contexts as well as organizations. Our individual context is our hidden strategy for dealing with life; determines all the choices we make. Above all, our context is our formula for winning, the source of our success.But more closely, this context is the box within which a person operates and which determines what is possible and impossible for him or her as a leader and, in addition, for the organization.
THE SISIFO MYTH
An interesting local example is that of a well-known Argentine family business, whose CEO, given the circumstances and who knows from what mental model, has asked me that when he tells his case, please do not name him or his company.
The story is that this man, of Italian descent, wanted to increase his family manufacturing company's annual income from $ 8 million to $ 20 million within the next 5 years. We are talking between `91 and` 96. In his own words, he had worked very hard to reach this goal for several years and was dissatisfied with the slow progress.
But when people proposed expansion plans to him, like adding a new line product or entering a new local market, exporting and thinking about globalizing, all he saw were incredible problems: the external executives that would have to be brought in, everything that he would need to learn, including the managers who, because they were family, were accommodating, etc. He refused to endorse the plans, or if he let some plan move he would stop him as soon as a contingency arose.
When I asked him how his usual day was composed, he answered: "I spend it working on the growth of the company." When I asked him to rethink his own conversational design process, both internal and external, and chose to stop to examine what he believed was malfunctioning, he realized that he was creating a context to avoid conflict, which was inconsistent with his supposed commitment to ambitious growth. He understood that that's why everything he did to grow the business obviously didn't work.
So we proposed to him to whitewash this situation with his family business group and to clearly establish which were the inconversibles who were not getting on the table and that each member of the family was really thinking and feeling. Eventually they came to a conclusion or set about becoming the $ 20 million company with their eyes open to the fact that there would be chaos, conflict, and possible cataclysms, but that he as Group Leader saw it as possible. Obviously this was an objective that was "out of the box", "outside the model" in which they were operating. The owner perceived it that way, but according to his words "his guts" they told him that if he could not convince his family to transform and face this new project, probably in a few years they would disappear from the market.The second option was to dedicate to gradual and incremental growth trying to reach $ 10,000,000.- The Family Board decided on the second option, that is, sales of $ 10 million, leaving the decision for the next generation to face a greater future. This was for the Board of Directors an “achievable” objective, for which they would not need Consulting support, much less Training.
When we said goodbye to the owner, he told us almost verbatim: “Ultimately, he did not care so much that the Board had not approved his project and in the end what I like despite the suffering is doing business and running the company. Somehow we are going to fix ourselves. ”
In 1993, even when the "Argentine context" and much more the global one was favorable to their type of manufacturing, they managed to invoice $ 6,830,000.- That is, they managed to decrease their invoicing by approximately 15%. In '96 we were consulted again to see if we could assist them in a possible presentation in bankruptcy. Unfortunately we missed a client, since that was not our specialty.
I must especially acknowledge the owner of this company with an impressive intuition and an extraordinary ability to fulfill his "self-fulfilling prophecy" with his family. I do not consider that these people have acted well or badly. In my opinion they acted as they chose and as they could. What I do allow myself to observe is that if the owner's "commitment" was, even if it were not, to continue having fun as an entrepreneur, I say that this did not succeed. Consequently, I affirm that at least the actions were not functional to the expected result.
Managing the Present from the Future
An organization that has a clear understanding of its own assumptions about the past is often motivated to alter the context in which it finds itself. This instead requires a turn in the SER of the organization and a powerful vision of the future. The activities involved in reinventing an organization require persistence and flexibility. Some extend along the entire path and others are like steps.
For this it is essential that in addition to the FOUR basic requirements that we discussed above, when we face a reinvention process we also take into account the need to:
- Assemble a critical mass of risk holders. By this I mean that leading pioneers on the path of reinventing an organization should never be left to the top five or six top executives. It is tremendously easy to reach the agreement of this group; they are usually a close fraternity and it is difficult to promote a deep observation of themselves among themselves. If there are revelations, they never go beyond this circle.
As has been proven in the experiences of many companies, this group must include a critical mass of risk holders, that group of employees who really make things happen. Some maintain the inclination of key resources. Others are very important to informal opinion networks. The group may include critical but rarely seen people as process engineers and technicians. The goal is to achieve an inertial effect, where there are enough players participating and enrolled to create and maintain the "momentum" that will allow the Organization to carry out the process.
These key risk holders must first determine if their company has what it takes to stay competitive, and if not, what to do about it. In the process, such a group will bring up unspoken suspicions and resentments. Its members will learn to work together and to respect dissenting opinions. All this constitutes a fundamental turn in the way the participants are, from a relationship of mistrust and resignation to one of authentic and powerful fellowship.
Once such a turn has happened, actions and reactions that previously would not have happened happen naturally and with surprising results.
- Agree on key distinctions and design the questions for the diagnosis: The first task of risk holders is to reveal and confront the real competitive situation of the company. This process will also reveal the barriers to significant organizational change - the organizational context. A company can go from "here" to "there" without first knowing what "here" means, nor can it choose to reinvent itself without knowing what "there" means.
The best approach is through diagnosis that generates a complete picture of how the organization really works: What are we assuming about our strategic position and customer needs that may not be valid? What functional units are weighted and will they be as important in the future as they were in the past? What are the main systems that drive the business? What are the core skills of the company? What are the shared values and idiosyncrasies that shape the being of the organization? If these questions are explored in depth, they generate answers that together give an image of how things really work.
- Generate a sense of the urgent and break the inconversibility of the inconversibles: Human beings are permanently related from three conversational spaces, our public, private and hidden conversations. This model generates in Organizations the existence of an unspoken code of silence in most corporations that encompasses the breadth of a company's weaknesses. But a threat that everyone perceives and that nobody talks about is much more debilitating for a company than a threat that has been clearly revealed. Companies, like people, tend to be as sick as their secrets.
A company can confront the most threatening problems of its survival and gather value to break with the past and embrace a new future. The Book of the 5 Rings, a guide to the Japanese samurai written four centuries ago, gives a recipe: the practice of visualizing death in battle as vividly as possible before actually entering battle. Having experienced "death" in advance, there is little more to fear and the warrior fights with complete abandon. This appears in action as a model in which by confronting the possible, this becomes less likely.
- Establish a Framework for Containment: There is an obscure cyber law - the law of variety of requirements - postulates that any system must internally promote and incorporate variety if it is to deal with external variety. This seems harmless until we consider how variety is displayed in companies. Usually it takes the form of that behavior like siphoning and emptying the scarce resources of the flow of main activities for experiments in the rear channels, disagreeing at the meetings and all that… Almost all opinions or behaviors that break the "theory in use ”In social systems are synonyms of conflict.
THE SOUNDS OF THE SILENCE
The threats that everyone is perceiving in the Organization, but that nobody puts on the table for discussion, cause more damage to companies than any other clearly revealed risk.
Paradoxically, most organizations stifle conversation about the inconversibles since many managers cannot accept being confronted because they assume they should "be in control." The problem here is that the control paradigm is the graveyard of invention, the learning processes, and the statement of commitments.
Conflict sets the creative process in motion. That is why the group process described above includes a large number of risk holders. When we extend participation to those who are truly accountable for critical resources, or who have entrenched positions, or who have been burned in other attempts at change, what we guarantee is conflict. But as the group copes with and handles difficult situations, there is a shift in how they relate to conflict and containment spaces. The participants, from a suitable conversational design, learn to disagree without being disagreeable.
The INTEL case
Emotions often accompany creative tension, and these emotions are not entirely pleasant. At Intel the conflict is crude at times. Says an observer: "If you are used to tennis, Intel plays rugby." They have created a company that receives disagreement, strong blows as a sign of good health. You leave everything behind in the locker room and forget it for the meeting the next day.
On a field trip to Tokyo to assess Intel's competitiveness against Japanese quality and service standards, the 20-person senior management team engaged in a fierce discussion about the company's approach to the Japanese market. Beneath the cues were deep resentments from those representing Intel's internal customers who were unable to obtain the desired quality and service from manufacturing. Chief Operating Officer Craig Barret, who was then leading manufacturing, was an active melee combatant. As one person on the board described it: "The four-letter word came and went like pin-pong ball at a Beijing Master tournament."
But two days later, team members sat down, worked out their differences, and put in the actions that helped Intel match or outstrip its Japanese rivals. Barret says, “I have fairly thick skin, which requires a lot to penetrate my long-lasting convictions. These types of "hardball" sessions are precisely what we all need to shed our illusions. It made us realize the games we were playing and how they were preventing us from facing the realities of Japanese competitiveness. ”
Contrary to what many Westerners might think about the importance of consensus in Japanese culture, institutionalized conflict is an integral part of Japanese management. At Honda, any employee, even a junior, can call a waigaya session. The rules are that people put their cards on the table and talk directly about problems. Nothing is off limits, from deficiencies in factory floor supervision to perceived lack of support for a design team. Waigaya legitimizes tension so that learning can take place.
The Japanese have learned to disagree without being disagreeable and to handle conflict in various and ingenious ways. One of its most important organizational design principles is redundancy - overlapping organization charts, business activities and managerial assignments, duplicate databases, and parallel lines of research.
With our deeply geared concept of organizations as machines, we are quick to judge those employees as inefficient, immediate candidates for elimination in the current fervor of process reengineering. But for the Japanese, redundancy and tension over ambiguities promote frequent dialogue and communication. They also generate internal competitiveness, particularly when parallel paths are pursued in the development of new products. Honda and Sony frequently use these techniques, assigning identical tasks to competitive teams. Regular project reviews determine which team receives funds to build the final prototype. Sony's compact disc player was developed in this way.The manager in charge gave two teams a piece of wood the size of a small book and said, "Build it to fit in this space." He recruited the talented Seiko and Citizen watches who were familiar with miniature work while unaware of the limits of audio design. Then he stepped aside and left them in the fight to do it.
Conflict has its human and organizational costs, but also the essential fuel for self-questioning and revitalization. Some western companies have incorporated conflict into their designs with this exchange in mind.
CONCLUSIONS
I affirm that a process of reinvention and recreation, both personal and organizational, is at least extremely UNCOMFORTABLE and constitutes an election that will include many setbacks along the way: systems that collapse and threaten to fall, dates that cannot be met, fractures that seem impossible to amend.
But just as containment in an organization can be highly productive, these setbacks are in my view precisely the triggers that make it possible for organizations and individuals to truly see themselves to confront and confront reinvention work. When an organization sets out to reinvent itself, setbacks can result from design rather than accident. This is the big difference between "declaring our own breakdowns" or walking the path all the time tripping over "the problems."
Perhaps a priori for the reader, it might seem that I am proposing to sow conflict and personal and organizational chaos. Nothing is further from my intention. Inventing an apparently impossible future and then managing from that future implies creating concrete tasks that inevitably lead to disagreements. These tasks must be carefully selected for the type of inconvenience the organization wants to generate. The executive team needs to identify the core strengths they want to build, the weaknesses in existing capabilities, and the leverage points at which the application of adequate energy generates adequate systemic results to achieve the organization.
Nordstrom's practice of providing outstanding customer service necessarily puts a great deal of stress on the system. But revealing weaknesses in a store's ability to respond to customer requests is the first step in strengthening those areas.
Others in the Europcar industry insisted that the company could not achieve these goals in less than two years, it would be closer to three years. But Europcar together with its partner in this project, the Perot Systems, decided on an “impossible” goal of 18 months. Managers knew that the resulting stress would reveal that Europcar's network of small reigns was preventing the company from successfully competing in the Pan-European market. Many country managers claimed that they did not have enough information about what was being designed and that they could never implement the new planning in time. Many also insisted on the high degree of tailoring for individual country markets that would ultimately have compromised the efficiency of the new system.These deep-seated territorial behaviors had to be exposed and overwhelmed if a true reinvention was to take place.
The purpose of designing the breaks themselves is to provide opportunities to enable both the organization and its executives to operate from a new model. But this time chosen. Not from a model that "has us", but from a "model that we use". Paradoxically, we can also fail in the project (as has frequently happened in the way of scientific discoveries and in the careers of innovators) and still achieve our re-creation, our transformation or our reinvention. Recall when Winston Churchill proclaimed that his repeated failures from the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli to his campaign defeat for a place in parliament in the years between the first and second,they allowed him to become his "being" to prepare him for the responsibilities of a prime minister in time of war.
I invite those who choose to accept the challenge of reinvention to embark on a journey of uncertainty, risk, and constant discovery. The organization finds peaks and valleys in spirit and morale, as the euphoria is clouded by conflict and the persistence of intense teamwork. Morale rises again as the alignment among risk holders occurs - it is subsequently left with the large and demanding task of recruiting cynics who are never lacking in an organization. Reinvention is a very demanding journey of ups and downs - an adventure for sure. And it is meant to be that way.
At the end of this trip allow me to make a "special request". Is it possible for you to give me your “refund” on these ideas?
My intention with this writing has been twofold. On the one hand I have tried to provoke it !!! Yes, as you read it. It's that simple. I have tried to provoke your reflection, your ability to review, question and rethink mental models, theories in use, behaviors, behaviors, conversations and paradigms, which make it possible for both you and your organization to choose whether they consider it as a possibility to reinvent yourself and face a new personal and organizational challenge.
My second intention is to invite you to open a conversation. A conversation for the possibility. The possibility of creating a relationship that until today does not exist and for which existence only you and I will be responsible.
I suggest that we look at E-news, the Internet and even the text itself, only as the components of a system that will allow us to create something together that until now was not a possibility for you and me. I choose to create it by inviting you to discuss my ideas. I invite you to co-create something much bigger together for both of us. And if you accept my request, remember that somewhere in this system, I am waiting to read, committed to your opinions, ideas and proposals.
I thank you for the time we have shared and "I leave it stinging"…
Would you be encouraged to RISK YOUR PRESENT to INVENT A REALLY POWERFUL FUTURE?
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