John Constantine writes:
>Malcolm Jones suggests: "In the spirit of inquiry.", " can't we just work
>on rolling goals, in terms of the WHATS, and let the HOWS evolve in
>practice."
>
>IMHO...God, I hope not! Forgive me but it sounds like a return to Peter
>Drucker and the archeology of MBO. There is no "magic bullet", or
>superguru who will solve all problems in any given organization, other
>than what might appear to be so after the fact.
I agreee with John that life " .is not static but everchanging,
nebulous,
>complex, and, yes, at times chaotic.
Yet allowing the Hows to emerge, and the whats as well, is
precisely what we are forced to by that nebulous complexity and chaos.
When environments shift, what changes is the underlying skeleton that
provided sense - Kuhn's term "paradigm" comes to mind here, thanks in
part to Jack's kind posting of TK's obituary. When a business's
environment shifts so dramatically that its old strategy of "how we
succeed in this business" no longer works, or is even actively
dysfunctional, then the firm faces a chaotic, equivocal environment: a
new underlying framework for making sense must be evolved, and that
means that both What and How are up for grabs. The bosses don't know the
answer, the guys in the field don't, the factory/office staff don't.
Nobody does. With luck, however, some creative people will put their
pieces of the puzzle together and jointly synthesize a new understanding
on which to build a (new) business and new strategy.
I don't think that management gurus can tell people what to do,
or how to do it with any precision. They may advise more participation,
more openness with information, or other procedurals that have been
empirically demonstrated to result in quicker genesis of solutions to
equivocal circumstances. But their advice will necessarily be fairly
generic, while the solutions must be quite specific. So let me put my
oar in here to stroke for emergent sense (What as well as How) when the
world turns upside down. In more moderate circumstances, (what Hurst
terms "the performance loop" when we know what needs doing and have a
pretty good idea of how to do it), there's less equivocality and more
room for separating the What and the How, and controlling for specified
outcomes. (But the fun parts - equal parts of exhiliration and terror,
I'm told - come when real change is in the offing.)
Sam
MXJELI@MAIL.WM.EDU
Mariann Jelinek
Richard C. Kraemer Professor of Business
Graduate School of Business,
College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Tel. (804) 221-2882 FAX: (804) 229-6135
************************************************************************
The only enduring strategic advantage is the ability
to change the rules of the game.
--mxjeli@mail.wm.edu (Mariann Jelinek)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>