giant companies are stinkers when it comes to long term performance
according to business guru tom peters
there are several reasons but they mainly seem to be about finding it difficult to cultivate an environment for new ideas. they get stuck. often they get to a stage where it feels hopeless and the pressure is really on and that is a moment of opportunity. tom peters suggests two ways to go at that point…
Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Who knows, you might get lucky …Or:
Extract "lessons learned" or "best practices."
Thicken the Book of Rules for Success.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.
i’m sure you can guess what i’m thinking. this so relates to the situation many once successful churches find themselves in but i don’t see too many taking the chance on going with the first list?…
That is so encouraging- just spent part of yesterday with 2 other clergy trying to tell me that a ‘missiological hermaneutic’ (now thats a big phrase for morning)was a flawed way of trying to do church- I recognised most of the phrases in Peters’ 2nd list…
Thanks- you are a breath of fresh air!
I know what you’re trying to say and currently being part of a grassroots protest at the imposition of a ridiculously cumbersome and crushing new staff appraisal system I find a lot in these lists to agree with. But one thing is niggling me: if giant companies are stinkers when it comes to long term performance, how come they are giant, and continuing to perform?
Jonny, I think successful organizations are those who have learned how to manage the extremes – balancing competitive, goal orientation with team focus and knowledge sharing; marrying consistent process and discipline with experiments and new approaches. In fact, a fun exercise might be to randomly take one idea from each of your lists above and ask, “How could you combine these 2 ideas to make your organization more outrageously successful?”
I have just measured the thinkness of volume 2 of the Methodist Church’s ‘Constitutional Practices and Disciplines’ – an unhealthy 30mm (and 705 grams).
It’s digressing somewhat and therefore probably off the mark from what John was commenting on, but Michael Frost (‘Exiles’) shares how giant corporations comprise 51 of the top 100 economies in the world – ‘the other 49 are entire countries’. Frost then reports of a “diagnosis” on these corporations – using the diagnostic tool from the WHO and the DSM-IV (used by psychiatrists and psychologists – concluded: ‘the institutional embodiment of laissez faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of “psychopath”‘.
By the way, that “thickness” not “thinkness” in my comment.
Your second list reminds me of my place of work (environment agency). I’m not sure which list works better but I would say that (after the floods) the second list is usually the one used when you have people to answer to, be it the public, politicians….the church elders?
The second offers security and an audit for when those wishing to attribute blame come running. the first does sound more attractive though….