Dear Thomas,
>In a recent discussion, you may be interested to note, we have decided >to
>test the assumption of the sponsors of my institute. We want to test if
>the intended organisations really need the managers we produce.
IMO, this question has a major priority and those intended organization
should be able to specify what kind of manager they need. Nevertheless,
during my work at Dresden University (as a consultant for small and medium
sized companies) i experienced that companies ocasionally do not know what
they really want. Sometimes it was necessary to specify their problems in
order to achieve some kind of priority of problems and actions.
>In reality, its not a simple question.
Your are certainly right. My experience (above) is, that people tend to
add complexity to their problems, because they were to deep in the
discussion to define their real problem. Imagine four or five managers
sitting at the table, everyone very much concerned with their objectives,
say one with marketing, one with production planning and control, one with
the shop floor, one with finance ... Everyone of them has his one
department and an according responsibility. Their mental models might not
reflect the whole company but just their responsibilities. For me it
proved very difficult to convince people through extracting the
system-links, the dependences, and so on. It tended to be much easier when
the group was able to define the problem of the company properly and then
to break it down to its particulars, its dependencies.
Therefore, I think defining the real problem properly is a (the?) major
step.
(According to Plato, I've already solved it when i define it. Sort of..)
Things might be different in your environment. I spent 2,5 years working
at Dresden University four years after Germanies reunification (Dresden is
located in the south of East-Germany, fifty kilometers north from the
border to the Czech Republic). The business environment was, and probably
is still quite turbulent.
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(^ ^)
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All the best
Thomas Struck
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
--struck <t.struck@bham.ac.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>