I appreciate Mike's comments. He and I have, indeed, had an interesting
off-line discussion.
I was laid off from Novell in June. The reason was simple: As quality
manager my job was to point out defects in our quality system, and make
sure they were changed. (Everyone else in the division had the same
responsibility; mine was just more noticeable.) One of the most difficult
problems I faced was that my managers, manager didn't support the quality
system _at all_. Belligerent would be a good word to describe his behavior
& his words.
I didn't work under him when I got the job. But then we went through a
re-organization, and I fell under his control. The first thing he did was
fire me as quality manager. To my amazement he replaced me with a woman
who had no experience in quality. Every day she came to me for help, with
the words "I'm in over my head" rolling off her lips.
Well before I got fired as quality manager I had the difficult problem of
trying to figure out how to get a senior manager to comply with the
quality system without pissing him off. I didn't do so well. He and I went
to war, and that war, in the end, cost me my job.
The Senior VP found out about the war, and was impressed with my position,
my logic, and my ability to communicate. He started talking about making
me a VP, which, frankly, scared the shit out of all the other VPs in the
division. The problem was it was a well known fact that I felt like Novell
was too authoritarian, and that the solution to most of our problems was
buried down in the bowels of the organization, not at the top. That meant
one thing: Empowerment! Which, senior managers interpreted to mean: A loss
of control!
The other thing I felt was important was to restructure the way the
division was managed. I had proposed a new measurement system which would
actually measure quality, but which required more technical skill from
managers. I also wanted to change our training program so that we taught
the things our engineers really needed to know to do their job. (I took
the position that knowledge was more important than processes; a process,
in a service organization, tells you what to do and when to do it, but it
can never tell you how to do it! We needed to develop more "how to"
knowledge if we were going to have a real quality system.)
It was with great passion that I espoused ideas that challenged the basics
of our business model. I felt that we were operating more on a
manufacturing model instead of on a model that was congruent with our
actual environment. Producing solutions to complex technical problems is
quite different than producing a widget on a manufacutring line. (This is
not to say both don't require skill and knowledge; I'm just saying they're
different.)
>From a quality perspective there is very little room for quality control.
For instance, I can't screen all the answers to our customers problems
before the customer gets them. It is a live environment. I can only
measure quality after the service has been delivered. I can't pull bad
service off the assembly line!
Another difference is that the number of potential problems is enormous,
and therefore, the number of potential solutions is equally great. The
probability that an engineer would see the exact same environment twice
was very low. THus we were discovering new knowledge every minute of every
day. Our quality system depended on our ability to capture and share that
knowledge. We didn't do so well. (Knowledge, were the cells that
replicated, so our organization could renew itself, grow, and maintain
it's own survival. This idea caused me a lot of grief.)
In the end, I got riffed. And I don't really mind. It was a peaceful
parting. The guy that laid me off told me he felt I cost Novell more money
than I produced, and therefore Novell could no longer pay me. I disagreed,
but I took his words calmly.
I'm now off to South Carolina to work as a consultant. I've learned a lot
from my Novell experience. I took the summer to think, review, and analyze
what happened and what I think I could have done differently. A lot of
reflection. But I can say that change is a angerous business when the
entire organization is built around power!
-- Benjamin B. Compton bcompton@enol.comLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>