Keith:
I agree that there are some rather basic disagreements between Joan and me.
But her very direct approach certainly stimulates one to think. I don't
quite agree with you on what is the major difference.
At 01:02 PM 5/17/96 EDT, you wrote:
>Replying to LO7430 --
>
> Brock Vodden <brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca> and Joan Pomo
> seem to be in agreement on some items and heated on others.
>
>The source of heat appears to be Joan's belief that empowerment
>is the answer and Brock is quite pessimistic on the ability of
>management to SEE what is not working.
I fully agree with Joan that empowerment is a most desirable outcome of
effective leadership.
All of my postings on this topic have been focused on a subset of
organizations which I have encountered, whose senior managers for various
reasons learn very little about management and think very little about it.
What they do learn, they pick up by osmosis in an environment that has few
good role models. These organizations are not likely to have heard the
word empowerment, let alone consider it a useful concept.
Yes, I am pessimistic about the future of these organizations and the
ability of their managers to see what is going wrong. I have observed
several of these companies collapse and disappear, in spite of being long
established businesses with several hundred employees. I see many others
grossly under-achieving because of poor management practices.
It is difficult to get consultants into a serious discussion about such
organizations, perhaps because they don't believe that such companies
exist, or that they are few in number. My hunch is that in Canada, in the
companies with up to 1,000 employees, such companies are in the majority.
If my hunch is correct, this represents a national problem. Even if my
observations are quite exagerrated, it is still worthy of our concern.
We can talk and talk and talk about empowerment, leadership, about
management theories, about excellence, about learning organizations -- all
good stuff, that I am excited about sharing with my usual clients -- but
it does absolutely nothing for this segment of the business community that
isn't listening.
I am still waiting for one person to begin a dialogue - or even a
discussion - on this matter.
Do you have any suggestions for what could be done, on a national scale,
to at least get the attention of a significant number of these
organizations?
Sorry for generating a little more heat in the rhetoric, but I feel deeply
about the importance of this issue to my country. I also feel very
strongly that the minds I encounter in this group are an extremely rich
source of ideas which might lead to a key to the issue.
Brock
--Brock Vodden Vodden Consulting Business Process Improvement "Where People and Systems Meet" brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>