Bill, you referenced McKinsey's book on Alchemy of Growth. I am very
familiar with that book. So are many of the senior managers in my
organization. McKinsey has been living with us for the past fifteen
years. We don't seem to have any more original thoughts without McKinsey
these days, but that's a whole discussion string in its own right.
The questions in my original note were more focused on how to help the
horizon I (McKinsey term) parts of the business (those whose thinking and
actions were limited to today and maybe two years out) begin to learn new
ways of doing things, like thinking about horizon III ideas (focus 6-10
years out). Many of the responses to this original note basically said -
wall off the horizon I business and let it die its slow death because it
won't change.
99% of our company is horizon I. We are a very old line manufacturer in a
very mature industry that grows about 3% a year. We are very asset
intensive and very vertically integrated. A few of us will probably be
put into a small team in the next few weeks to go develop the processes by
which we do business in the horizon III time frame.
One of my overriding concerns is what will happen to many of our workers
today. My bias is that to overcome some of the problems inherent with our
structure today, we need to outsource all or almost all of our
manufacturing to businesses that exist outside the company today. We
shouldn't own them or their assets, we will only form an alliance with
them to use our engineering, sales and distribution operations to take
their manufactured products to market. In essence, we stop being a large
manufacturing company and become a service company. Over the next ten
years, we could begin to jettison thousands of workers. We may only need
10% of the workers we have today.
My moral dilemma is what happens to the other 90%? How do we begin to
prepare them for this new learning? We have some extremely strong
paradigms at the senior management level that probably can't even begin to
embrace the idea of us not being a manufacturer, but a holding company of
manufacturers. We are a family owned business and I fear the chairman has
such an emotional attachment to the legacy of his ancestors that he can't
make this mental leap. If this little team can't help the organization
learn how and why we have to fundamentally change the business, to undergo
the "deep change" Robert Quinn talks about in his book, are we destined
to become the "dead tadpoles?" (Quinn's analogy is to the old story about
the boiled frog experiment. His point is that if the frog boils to death
that's one thing, but because of inaction, the frog also destines all the
tadpoles to the same fate.)
--Kim Ridgway kridgway@neo.rr.com
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