Scott Simmerman writes:
"But when organizations attempt to formalize this process [managing
people's ideas for improvement] into a business improvement strategy, the
systems fail, the workers get frustrated and nothing (or little) seems to
happen."
My $0.02 is that managers are held accountable for results, but not
learning and improvement. If I were king, I'd want to know "who's
improving, and how much did you improve?" If two groups, A and B, came to
me with their results, and A outperformed B, but B improved much more than
A, I'd be putting my money on B for the next performance period. B knows
how to learn and improve; A, while currently a better performer, may be
stagnating. Back in my TQM days, I came across a great measure of
improvement used, I think, by Dutch Shell. They measured the percentage
gain in performance vs. some benchmark. So B might have closed 60% of a
big gap, while A might have only closed 30% of a small gap. Although
organizational learning is a key critical success factor, learning and
improvement are not measured and rewarded the way results are. We try to
formalize the process (e.g., TQM), but we keep the old performance system.
I guess no rocket science there. Other views?
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>