Ladies and gentlemen,
With all due respect to the Sears' CEO viewpoint that organizations should
reward for results and so forth, the picture that is drawn reminds me of a
company which is on the West Coast which has in each managerial office a
monitor which essentially tracks such "results" as they happen. You can't
get much fasater than that.
This leads to the unfortunate (in my view) "dead-zoning" of the managers
themselves who sit and stare minute by minute as the numbers roll in, or
don't roll in as the case may be.
Sears CEO correctly states that by the time the Annual Report comes out,
the numbers are "stale". Am I missing something here?! Pick out a "new"
system for tracking numbers, and reward on that basis?
First, does Sears (or any similar outfit) know what is going on in the
company, what drives the quality that customers seek? Or do they as many
do, simply rely on the number crunchers to tell them what they think they
need to know. My guess is the latter, judging by the wording of Mr. Rucci.
Is he really their new chief learning officer. I don't think so, since he
is saying what hordes of others have said in the past..."we need a better
(faster) way of tracking so we know where we are." And with that better
tracking fine-honed to achieve the minute by minute gains or losses in
whatever the metric is, we can now do ...what?? Reward according to the
results obtained?
Oh my.
Sears CEO got his education somewhere, like most other CEO's with MBA
degrees (I am assuming he has one). But it may not have done much for his
foresight, his creativity, or his organization. He is still stuck in the
drying cement of being blinded by the numbers, by a system (accounting)
which has been around since the sixteenth century. Is that where you would
want YOUR company to place your eggs? Any manager worth a penny has been
dealing with stale thinking for too long, and has had to play the numbers
game within their organizations. You can always find a way to make things
look better than they actually are by fudging here or there, moving
calendar dates around to allow for more, or fewer, options for revenue. In
a bad month you can hold what comes in at the tail-end for entry to next
month's books. That goes on all the time, all over the country, and its
basis is accounting, not improvement. It is quite true that I am being
cynical and, I believe, accurate at the same time.
Think of such a situation where you or your unit has been asked "why don't
your numbers look as good as A's, or B's or C's or D's. What is wrong
with you that you can't produce?? Maybe we should find someone (another
manager?) to replace you. Maybe A's manager would be better, since he/she
doubled your "results". And in our company we pay for RESULTS, remember?"
Does anybody out there remember the Beer Game, or the Red Bead experiment?
I would submit that Sears' CEO seems in a bit of a fog, and perhaps not
much of a good example for a "Chief Learning Officer". I don't see the
learning here, but more of a "retrograde" organization.
[Host's Note: Richard Goodale said about Sears the following...]
>There is an extremely thought-provoking interview in the current issue of
>Fortune (pp. 98-99 of the International edition) with Anthony Rucci,
>effectively "Chief Learning Officer" of Sears. In it he makes the point
>that financial performance is a lagging indicator of organisational
>effectiveness. As he rightly says "by the time your company publishes its
>annual report, it's too late to do anything about it."
>
>This strongly reinforces my experience in helping organisations develop
>systems to measure strategic performance. One of the the main reasons
>that good strategies fail is that they are not properly measured. One of
>the main reasons they are not properly measured is that organisations are
>inclined to measure too late, after the fact, rather than while the
>strategy is being executed. Also, while outputs (results) are measured,
>inputs (processes) rarely are.
>
>Sears has developed a means for identifying and measuring the critical
>inputs to the execution of its key strategy, virtually as they occur. Are
>these inputs (e.g. employee attitudes, customer perception) "processes" or
>a "results?" Both, probably. What is important, however, is that even if
>they are "results" they are ones which are not normally tracked, or if
>tracked, not properly integrated into the compensation and other reward
>systems of the organisation. Sears is apparently doing both.
--Regards, John Constantine rainbird@trail.com Rainbird Management Consulting PO Box 23554 Santa Fe, NM 87502 http://www.trail.com/~rainbird
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>