I've enjoyed very much the exchange Rol Fessenden (LO10504) started about
downsizing and its impact on security and creativity - its a subject I've
been interested in for many years.
Downsizing is a dead end for many of the reasons covered in this thread.
It hurts people just as ongoing reliance on it in lieu of a growth
strategy harms the corporations doing it.
A key question is: what will replace it, considering many of the
conditions that have driven downsizing are still alive and well in many
industries (intensified global competition, fast product life cycles,
deregulation, etc)?
About a year ago I discussed this point with Robert Shapiro at Monsanto.
Ongoing creativity is something he felt was vital to nourish, but he had
to admit all the work of restructuring was far from complete. Our
discussion of change and its impact on people quickly got us to the
traditional Lewin model (Unfreeze from the old ways, Change, and Refreeze
into the new state). We quickly decided that, in his company at least,
the first two steps were vital, but the third was a dangerous illusion.
While undending turmoil in Monsanto's industries might make it hard to
"get over the hump" and settle down again, importing all the chaos of the
marketplace into Monsanto's organization might be just as dysfunctional as
announcing the last downsizing. Our dialogue then drifted to consider
what might make up a middle ground of options for structuring work. We
quickly rejected the matrix organization, but speculated that structures
than bring with them an expectation of development and change might be a
useful direction.
The approaches we talked about included:
- setting terms limits for all managers;
- giving employees portfolios of assignments (each with a predefined
begining, middle and end), not individual jobs;
- and giving less emphasis to trendy process-driven structures (arising from
mechanistic reengineering) and, instead, model business units more after
biological organisms - like the amoeba.
Lifeboats (assessment and counseling, reemployment assistance, retraining,
cash) also would need to be available to everybody, for an indefinite
period. We had to break up our meeting before getting to the real sticky
issues like pay and career paths.
Have any of you found any workable solutions in this middleground?
Bob Tomasko
RMTomasko@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>