You must be logged in to update your preferences.
I note a distinct schism in business, with one camp which utterly rejects Deming’s 95/5, and another camp which wholly embraces the idea. Few sit on the fence, and pretty much never the twain shall meet.
What If #1 – No Management What if an organisation had the insight, the courage, the sheer chutzpah to move away from the traditional management hierarchy to some other form of organisational structure – e.g. without hierarchy, and without managers? What might we reasonably expect to happen? “If a factory is torn down but the rationality …Read More
Why don’t some people want to change? Even when ‘we’ know things can be improved, often dramatically, we still seem to puzzle with those that seem less enthused. And of course, we never truly know what drives the behaviours, unless they tell us. But that doesn’t happen particularly often in the work environment. So, what can we do?
I listened to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme a while ago. It included some criticism of the UK Government’s ‘black-box’ approach to outsourcing within its Welfare-to-Work programme; where outsourced service providers are paid by results. Whilst no doubt some political points were being made, the claim was that the lack of scrutiny of how the outsourced service providers were performing their work resulted in unemployed people being pressured into self-employment, even when their enterprise was doomed to failure. Short term results or outcomes are achieved, but the underlying problem is not addressed.
Since Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad put forth the idea of “core competencies” in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” organizations have taken this insight as permission to outsource various parts of their business operations.
In the recent Ernst and Young report : The science of winning in financial servicesit has identified that the highest growing Financial Service company’s are outstripping their competitors. The secret sauce is that these high growth companies are focussed on exploiting data and analytics in revenue-generating areas such as marketing and sales.
New data and technology is driving the re-invigoration of Analytic models and creating new one to one customer models in Insurance. Telematics provides insurance companies with more information to assure the competence and risk of your driving style. The easy and readily available information about flood zones has already disrupted the insurance market.
Of course the answer is yes. As long as you can get into a position to see the organisation as a system, including the context in which it operates. One of the fundamental concepts of Lean and Systems Thinking is taking an outside-in perspective – typically from the customers’ perspective.
“The no-change approach to organisational change” was the focus of this week’s drop-in session (December 1) as HiveMinder Kenny Grant lead a discussion on the evolutionary, people-centric approach taken at Northern Gas Networks, in the context of Agile / Lean change.
What is Apple’s customer service number if your 69p app fails to download?
Or perhaps another questions for anyone that owns an iPod, iPad or iPhone: when was the last time you pressed “Buy” in the app store and it didn’t work?