Teaching The Elephant To Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organization
288
Teaching The Elephant To Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organization
288eBook
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Overview
This is a warning sign, a symptom of impending disaster for any organization.
Shackled, like powerful elephants, to the past, organizations rob themselves of the ingenuity required to meet new competitive challenges and escape the "re" dimension trap of "re-engineering, re-organization and re-structuring that concentrate on short term fixes rather than long term solutions.
Teaching the Elephant to Dance is a practical, hands-on guide for creating the right change in any organization, large or small, corporate or governmental, manufacturing or service based. Filled with illuminating case studies, it shows how to devise new corporate visions and strategies... how to overcome inertia .. and how to form labor-management partnerships. Clear, authoritative, practical and inspiring, Teaching the Elephant to Dance provides a step-by-step guide for making the impossible happen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307818744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
Teaching the Elephant to Dance
Empowering Change in Your Organization
We need to change. We're in trouble. Business as usual is out. Here's why.
• Lower real wages. A weekly paycheck buys less today than it did twenty-five years ago.
• U.S. and other Western countries' market shares have declined in every major market since 1980.
• Foreigners are buying national crown jewels for pennies. The papers are full of raiders crossing borders for asset grabs. Americans have seen such "native" jewels disappear into foreign ownership hands as Columbia Pictures, CBS Records, and Rockefeller Center (Rockettes and all). The British have seen Morgan Grenfell Group PLC-the sixth largest British merchant bank-bought by Deutsche Bank, important pieces of the defense firm Plessey wind up in Siemens' stable, and one ofthe last British luxury car medallions-jaguar-bought by U.S. car maker Ford. And, the Belgians have seen their largest company-Societe Generale de Belgique SA-come under combined French and Italian control.
• In less than twenty years, if the trade deficit isn't improved, foreign companies will own enough dollars to buy every publicly traded company in the U.S. Today, one Japanese computer company has sufficient cash to buy all ofEurope's computer companies-and still have $7 billion left.
• Both the United States and United Kingdom trail in significant productivity measures. The U.S. is behind Japan, Britain, France, and Italy in terms of productivity growth. We're way behindJapan in other measures of competitiveness.
In market after market the U.S. as well as European countries are being outsold, outhustled, and outproduced.
I know I'm not alone in feeling like Peter Finch, star ofthe movie Network, who urged his listeners to open up their windows and shout out, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"
There are plenty ofpositive examples out there ofpeople changing things around, bucking the trend. Big organizations. Small organizations. Government organizations. Manufacturing companies. Service organizations. There are examples we can learn from. This book is about how to do it in your organization.
ORGANIZATIONS ARE LIKE ELEPHANTS-SLOW TO CHANGE
Over the past decade I've consulted with, studied, and managed a wide range of organizations. My experience tells me that organizations are like elephants-they both learn through conditioning.
Trainers shackle young elephants with heavy chains to deeply embedded stakes. In that way the elephant learns to stay in its place. Older elephants never try to leave even though they have the strength to pull the stake and move beyond. Their conditioning limits their movements with only a small metal bracelet around their foot-attached to nothing.
Like powerful elephants, many companies are bound by earlier conditioned constraints. "We've always done it this way" is as limiting to an organization's progress as the unattached chain around the elephant's foot.
Success ties you to the past. The very factors that produced today's success often create tomorrow's failure. Consider Xerox, for example. Xerox had a close call with disaster-and it was mostly because of its own success. In the early and middle 1970s Xerox could do no wrong-at least that's what they thought. They hired the best people, had the best marketing activities, and "owned" the market. Even to this day executives say, "Make me a Xerox," when they want a copy. But all the "right" activities led the company to the brink of disaster.
Believing they were invincible, Xerox executives refused to take the Japanese competition seriously. They didn't realize, for instance, that theJapanese had a 50 percent cost advantage until five years after they lost significant market share. CEO David Kearns saw the need for change.s He is busy now getting his elephants to leave their past constraints behind.
Talking about institutions trapped by their successful past, how about Sears? Sears was (and still is) the largest U.S. retailer. But it was-and still is-in serious trouble. Between 1978 and 1980 Sears's merchandise sales actually declined 2.4 percent-during a period of double-digit inflation. Sears's stock price fell from $62 a share in 1972 to $14.50 a share in 1980. Yet no one was willing to change the creaking bureaucracy that assured high overhead costs-forty executives in the drapery department alone-and slow response to changes in consumer tastes.
It took massive intervention to save the unwilling patient. Nothing less than all-out war-in the words of Sears CEO Ed Brennan "to destroy a thing called Headquarters and a thing called Field and create a thing called Sears." Store closings and 21 percent reduction in employment, including the early retirement of 1,500 career executives, prodded the elephant to consider new ways. Slowly, the "Store of the Future" took shape-very slowly-too slowly for customers as Sears continued to lose market share. Even today the "revolution" is far from complete. Can Sears survive? There are hopeful signs. But the jury is still out."
Or look at Courtaulds, the $3-plus billion U.K. textile manufacturer. When Sir Christopher Hogg arrived in 1980 it looked like curtains for Courtaulds and the rest of the U.K. textile business. Managers were trapped in the vicious cycle of poor results, more conservative management, which led to even poorer results. Hogg realized that he had to break the mold.
The elephant was caught in a death dance.
Hogg reorganized into six business sectors. He insisted on meeting or beating the standard.s set by the best world-class competitors. Those operations that did not meet the test were closed or sold-unheard of in the U.K. textile business.
The results. Since 1982 Courtaulds's pretax profit rose an average of 37 percent per year.
Previous successes and past practices root American and European companies firmly to old ways of doing business. We can count on the fact that the old way of doing business will not succeed in the future.
In today's fast-paced world, elephants are an endangered species. Slow, ponderous, bulky pachyderms can't move fast enough to escape the competitive laser gun. Fleetness of foot is required. So gazelles survive, not slow-to-change elephants.