Joan:
On 5/7/96, in reply to my posting LO7218, you wrote: (regarding what I
described as a national systemic flaw in the way we select, promote and
develop our senior managers, and my question "How do we change the culture
- not just of an organization - but of a nation?"), you wrote:
>We change just as one eats an elephant, one bite or one person at a time.
If we spend 30 years addressing these leadership problems, one
person/company at a time, we will have missed the opportunity to define
and address the systemic problem which will continue to produce deficient
leaders. Rather than fixing the casualties, I have the hope of getting at
the cause, the "conventional wisdom" that has been leading almost all of
our small and medium-sized businesses astray and a significant number of
our large businesses.
The problem here is not lack of a definition of leadership or knowledge
and experience with helping leaders to develop their capacities. We have
many resources for that task.
The issue that I am trying to address is the myriad of underachieving
organizations led by poorly educated executive teams which do not possess
the full range of competencies required by their task. They don't know
that they have a problem. They are not likely to address problems they
don't see.
I believe we cannot continue to look at this as one company's problem
(multiplied by x). It is a national problem - if not a Western world
problem. It is in my view a major drag on Canada's productivity.
What an opportunity! If we can find the upstream factors, and a way to
deal with them, and ways to get the attention of a majority of the
under-achievers, the potential for productivity gains are enormous.
-- Brock Vodden Vodden Consulting Business Process Improvement "Where People and Systems Meet" brock.vodden@odyssey.on.caLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>