Corporate Dictatorships
Here's an interesting read on Innovation Do's and Don'ts. Since I've always been suspect when it comes to the intentions of upper management, this caught my attention.
Which fits my experience with corporate America.
Most employees feel powerless to turn the direction of the corporate ship. Mandates are handed down from above, although many employees know that it's a mistake. The problem is that news never travels up. It's filtered by managers who do not wish to be the bearer of bad news. Plus, upper management feel that the lowly employees don't see 'the big picture'.
The last major billion dollar corporation I worked for, always create new initiatives each year to present to the shareholders. Many times the initiatives were completely opposite from the previous years. In other words, we kept going backwards and forwards. Spending money undoing something, then putting it back.
For example:
When I joined this corporation we had 8 Regional Offices. Then we acquired a competitor and integrated their business into ours. This company then decided that to be more efficient, we needed to be more centralized. That there was duplication of services, and a waste of resources. And with less regions we can react to the market faster. So we went from 8 Regions to 3.
This took a lot of work. Our data systems were a mess. We had no way of changing the Region classification without corrupting the data. Plus our applications would need to be rewritten to handle this.
We spent over a year and millions to get this done. And in the end, it was a patch job. As soon as we went live with the changes, Upper Management decided that we needed to be able to be more responsive to the needs of the local markets. Since our company purchases timber to make paper, local offices really drive the process since they get to meet with the customer face to face.
So they decided we needed to be a more diverse purchasing company and divided the 3 combined regions into 12.
Now we spent another year and millions of dollars splitting the patched 3 regions into 12.
During the initial combine into 3 Regions, the foresters kept raising the red flag that the model would not work. That it would increase costs and slow the response time to the suppliers. But their managers did not raise the issue far enough up the chain to get to the decision makers, who saw 'the bigger picture'.
-Mizike-
Most large companies have a change model that is essentially borrowed from poorly governed Third World dictatorships. The only way you can change them is with a coup. When a company gets into trouble, the board changes the CEO. So many companies think they can only be run by geniuses. Ordinary employees have abdicated their responsibility for being agents of change. Most people's innovation impulses lie dormant as they wait for the great vision to come down from the top.
Which fits my experience with corporate America.
Most employees feel powerless to turn the direction of the corporate ship. Mandates are handed down from above, although many employees know that it's a mistake. The problem is that news never travels up. It's filtered by managers who do not wish to be the bearer of bad news. Plus, upper management feel that the lowly employees don't see 'the big picture'.
The last major billion dollar corporation I worked for, always create new initiatives each year to present to the shareholders. Many times the initiatives were completely opposite from the previous years. In other words, we kept going backwards and forwards. Spending money undoing something, then putting it back.
For example:
When I joined this corporation we had 8 Regional Offices. Then we acquired a competitor and integrated their business into ours. This company then decided that to be more efficient, we needed to be more centralized. That there was duplication of services, and a waste of resources. And with less regions we can react to the market faster. So we went from 8 Regions to 3.
This took a lot of work. Our data systems were a mess. We had no way of changing the Region classification without corrupting the data. Plus our applications would need to be rewritten to handle this.
We spent over a year and millions to get this done. And in the end, it was a patch job. As soon as we went live with the changes, Upper Management decided that we needed to be able to be more responsive to the needs of the local markets. Since our company purchases timber to make paper, local offices really drive the process since they get to meet with the customer face to face.
So they decided we needed to be a more diverse purchasing company and divided the 3 combined regions into 12.
Now we spent another year and millions of dollars splitting the patched 3 regions into 12.
During the initial combine into 3 Regions, the foresters kept raising the red flag that the model would not work. That it would increase costs and slow the response time to the suppliers. But their managers did not raise the issue far enough up the chain to get to the decision makers, who saw 'the bigger picture'.
-Mizike-
posted by Mizike at 10:39 AM
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