LO Learners,
Following up on Stever's comments and Ed's response:
Once I studied under an excellent OD consultant and Wharton Prof who used
one of his consulting experiences as way to get us to consider that our
viewpoints were not always the only or best. He told of a cracker and
cookie facility that was interested in becoming more productive through
various socio-technical and OD concepts. And he and his team went to work
on looking at the production lines and organizing focus groups and so on.
They worked with two lines as the pilot and the remaining lines were to be
done after pilot test. What they discovered after much work and
difficulty was that the lines were made up entirely of young and
middle-aged women who were working because they had to and they did not
want to change much because they liked the ability to do their jobs
without thought - they said (when finally asked) that they had too many
demands on them at home, church and work and the vast majority wanted jobs
that were very routine so that they could rest from the rest of their
cares. I have since seen some similar groups in my own consulting.
And, as for McDonalds and other fast food purveyors, a lot of their hires
are teen-agers who need to make money and learn some basic work skills
like dependability and seniors who want to supplement their income in an
environment that offers a lot of human interaction. Do they have career
paths -yes, but for a limited number of their workers. And a lot of
health care operations and other service industries have similar outlooks.
So, IMHO, I think there may be aspects and uses of LO concepts for such
operations but they are different ones than for a technology-based
operation, etc.
ttfn,
patria frame
Strategies for Human Resources
StratHR4PF@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>