I recently read J. P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. The thwarted tale of Charles Gray, a small town boy from a family just below the elite who became engaged to the daughter of that elite, was predictable for anyone who’s lived in such a town. The matter-of-fact style borrowed from Middletown only underlined the familiarity.
While I was reading about Clyde, Massachusetts, General Motors was filing bankruptcy papers in New York, raising once again questions about why its culture chose failure when confronted with serious challenges to its survival.
Marquand’s 1949 novel suggests that GM had not just marketed to the Clydes of the country, but had absorbed the small town social structure with its rigid hierarchy that dictated Cadillac would always be better than Chevy, and both were ordained to always be better than any other division in the company and all better than any possible competitor.
Like Laurence Lovell, a father who would refuse his daughter’s suitor because he and Gray’s father had once disagreed, GM executives believed they could ignore upstarts like Pontiac and Saturn where new ideas actually existed that challenged their world view that the best product was the one with the greatest profit margin. The company felt vindicated when they chased away John DeLorean and Roger Smith, fought off Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, battled Walter Reuther and Roger Penske to a draw, in the same way Lovell was happy when young Gray abandoned any hopes for his daughter, Jessica.
The cultural insularity was partly the product of the company decision to use its own training school, General Motors Institute. The corporation came to prefer men who came up through an organization as rigid as that of the bank described by Marquand where the talented could not be promoted if they’d attended the wrong prep school, joined the wrong fraternity at the wrong college, married the wrong woman, or joined the wrong golf club. Once Gray’s co-worker, Roger Blakesley, was perceived to entertain inappropriate ambitions, he was asked to resign.
Small towns have been dying for a long time because entrepreneurs simply no longer are willing to put up with slights like those Lovell cast on Francis Stanley, the man who bought the local brass works and not only employed most of the men in town, but brought in talented men from outside like the engineer Elbridge Sterne. Sterne married Gray’s sister, Dorothea, and took the relics of her family back to Kansas when he was offered a better job after her father died.
It wasn’t just southern towns willing to lure foreign companies with tax incentives and promises of labor that could be pacified without unions that threatened the economic existence of small towns. Every small company that located in a more open-minded area, where achievement was more important than ascribed status, represented a lost opportunity.
In the end, Jessica Lovell found no one suitable to marry and had to settle for the only single man left from her generation, one who had endured the town, forever conscious of conforming to the rules for advancement. Her now much older father continued to call her fiancé Charles years after he had vanquished that threat. The new man simply remained invisible.
The people who are most angry with GM right now are the dealers in the small Clydes across the country who now are being cut off for not being urban enough. They recognize the irony of being left behind by a company that would prefer to remain more provincial than they.
Showing posts with label Corporate Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corporate Culture. Show all posts
Friday, July 03, 2009
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Competition - Part 1 - Brand X Telephone
My telephone company just changed hands, and it looks like things are going to stay bad. I had hope a few years ago when the company that owned our company got bought by a major utility that we might finally get some genuine service. But, as part of the deal, they sold us off, to maintain competition.
What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.
Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.
I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.
But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.
When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.
Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.
Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.
When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.
I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.
I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.
While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.
Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received
They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.
Where’s the competition for the customers?
Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.
I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.
The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.
The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.
Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.
What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.
Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.
I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.
But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.
When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.
Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.
Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.
When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.
I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.
I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.
While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.
Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received
They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.
Where’s the competition for the customers?
Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.
I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.
The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.
The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.
Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Design - Part 2 - Logos
We all read about General Motor’s declining market share. I got curious about how statistics that influence Wall Street stock traders translated into the real world. After all, if a large part of the market is rental companies and the well-to-do who trade cars every year, then the market may represent only a fraction of the vehicles on the road.
I started counting the number of cars that passed me in traffic that were made by GM, Ford or Chrysler. What surprised me was not the results, about evenly divided between the Big Three and the others, but the difficulty of determining who made which vehicle.
I confess I’ve never been much interested in what cars look like, and could never play children’s identification games. I could easily be the prototype for those playful stories written about what a Martian or 22nd century archaeologist would think.
Still, when I started to look, I was struck by how true it is that most cars look alike, that many station wagons (SUVs) look alike, that most pickup trucks look alike, even how similar are sports cars. Only VW’s and Jeeps are still recognizable, and only some of those.
I turned to reading the car name or logo, and discovered another problem. Most names on cars assume the watcher already knows who makes what, is an informed consumer. The logos are hard to find, and most are interchangeable. It took several days to determine some weren’t fancy hood latches, and longer to learn which logos and models went with which manufacturers.
Ford’s blue oval is the most recognizable: the colored shape is instantly recognizable and it’s usually placed on the right side by the rear taillight where a driver is most likely to be looking in traffic. Most of the others are chrome designs in hollow circles under the center brake lights. One doesn’t have time in traffic to distinguish internals of common shapes when detail blurs at more than a car length.
Apparently everyone is selling understated elegance. Only older cars and trucks have names that are large enough to read at any safe driving distance. The logos for both Chevrolet and Ford have been shrunk. The one for Oldsmobile has been so modernized, I had to decode it to connect it with its maker.
After a while, I started speculating on how many logos were really the same. If I turned the Oldsmobile rocket slightly, I had an Accura; if I turned it some more I had a Lexus. How does one tell the Oldsmobile logo from the ruptured duck of Lake Central air lines, what would a Rorschach test make of it? This is not the kind of speculation designers should be inviting in traffic.
At the time I was pondering the failure of automotive designers to create unique, identifiable vehicles, GM was selling its mortgage finance division, GMAC. The photographs I saw of the executives showed them wearing identical grey suits and yellow or red ties. Similar photographs of Ford executives announcing plant closings in January of this year, 2006, showed them in similar grey suits, with nondescript ties.
The only difference between the executives: GM grey was more bluish, Ford grey more brown. The GM ties stood out more than the Ford ones, but, by calling attention to themselves, exaggerated the impression they were somehow not right.
The message they delivered, like the logos, was not the one intended. They were supposed to personify power and elegance, a united management team. They didn’t want to show the diversity that appears in work place meetings, where some wear suits, some sport coats. Most wear white shirts, some wear blue. The majority wear ties, some bolos. Jerry York appears in a turtleneck.
Instead, they were like the automobiles and logos they market. They demonstrated they could not show distinguishing individual traits within the range of what was defined as acceptable.
One could go a step farther, and note that the men in the GM photograph had similar builds, similar hairstyles, were of the same general age. At Ford, three of the men on stage had similar characteristics, and were little different than the GM executives. Indeed, there’s nothing that distinguishes Bill Ford from Rick Wagoner to the uninitiated.
Ford had five men on stage, and the other two were physically different. The finance man, Don Leclair, was silver haired and slightly built. Jim Padilla, Ford’s president, was a big man who dwarfed those around him. His bones were big, his shoulders were wide, his skull was large. He’s the only one who came up through the plant floor, and the only one whose body language in a New York Times photograph signaled his disapproval of what he was hearing.
Padilla’s the first to be removed. David Cole tells us, he "helped management reconnect with Ford’s people in the plants and with Ford’s dealers after the chaos of early 2001." Now that the company is closing the plants he salvaged, the company needs someone who will "not get consumed himself in what will be a very difficult process."
Bill Ford is going to use a committee, not someone described as a "fiery" engineer from a Detroit Mexican-Irish family.
Automobiles are about style and performance. Logos and demeanor in public forums distill style into potent symbols. These suggest companies haunted by Henry Ford’s antisemitism and William Durant’s flamboyance, the failure of Edsel and GM models not remembered, companies who’ve spent too many years defining themselves as what they are not.
Now it’s time to define who they are, and they fear strong individuals, who are the only ones who’ve ever made a difference. Instead, they bury themselves in consensus. No doubt public relations advisors submit logos to focus groups to identify anything that might put off some customer. Likewise, experts no doubt suggest how men should dress, based on research like that of James Molloy on how people respond to clothing.
Committees may avoid failure, conformity may reassure Wall Street; they don’t guarantee success and they obviously don’t sell cars.
Sources:
Cole, David. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "Ford president Jim Padilla to retire," Detroit Free Press,
6 April 2006.
Ford plant closing photographs, Fabrizio Costantini, The New York Times, 24 January 2006, and The Detroit News, 24 January 2006.
GMAC sale photograph, Rebecca Cook, Reuters, The Detroit News, 3 April 2006.
Molloy, John T. Dress for Success, 1975.
York, Jerry. Photograph, Jeff Kowalski, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
I started counting the number of cars that passed me in traffic that were made by GM, Ford or Chrysler. What surprised me was not the results, about evenly divided between the Big Three and the others, but the difficulty of determining who made which vehicle.
I confess I’ve never been much interested in what cars look like, and could never play children’s identification games. I could easily be the prototype for those playful stories written about what a Martian or 22nd century archaeologist would think.
Still, when I started to look, I was struck by how true it is that most cars look alike, that many station wagons (SUVs) look alike, that most pickup trucks look alike, even how similar are sports cars. Only VW’s and Jeeps are still recognizable, and only some of those.
I turned to reading the car name or logo, and discovered another problem. Most names on cars assume the watcher already knows who makes what, is an informed consumer. The logos are hard to find, and most are interchangeable. It took several days to determine some weren’t fancy hood latches, and longer to learn which logos and models went with which manufacturers.
Ford’s blue oval is the most recognizable: the colored shape is instantly recognizable and it’s usually placed on the right side by the rear taillight where a driver is most likely to be looking in traffic. Most of the others are chrome designs in hollow circles under the center brake lights. One doesn’t have time in traffic to distinguish internals of common shapes when detail blurs at more than a car length.
Apparently everyone is selling understated elegance. Only older cars and trucks have names that are large enough to read at any safe driving distance. The logos for both Chevrolet and Ford have been shrunk. The one for Oldsmobile has been so modernized, I had to decode it to connect it with its maker.
After a while, I started speculating on how many logos were really the same. If I turned the Oldsmobile rocket slightly, I had an Accura; if I turned it some more I had a Lexus. How does one tell the Oldsmobile logo from the ruptured duck of Lake Central air lines, what would a Rorschach test make of it? This is not the kind of speculation designers should be inviting in traffic.
At the time I was pondering the failure of automotive designers to create unique, identifiable vehicles, GM was selling its mortgage finance division, GMAC. The photographs I saw of the executives showed them wearing identical grey suits and yellow or red ties. Similar photographs of Ford executives announcing plant closings in January of this year, 2006, showed them in similar grey suits, with nondescript ties.
The only difference between the executives: GM grey was more bluish, Ford grey more brown. The GM ties stood out more than the Ford ones, but, by calling attention to themselves, exaggerated the impression they were somehow not right.
The message they delivered, like the logos, was not the one intended. They were supposed to personify power and elegance, a united management team. They didn’t want to show the diversity that appears in work place meetings, where some wear suits, some sport coats. Most wear white shirts, some wear blue. The majority wear ties, some bolos. Jerry York appears in a turtleneck.
Instead, they were like the automobiles and logos they market. They demonstrated they could not show distinguishing individual traits within the range of what was defined as acceptable.
One could go a step farther, and note that the men in the GM photograph had similar builds, similar hairstyles, were of the same general age. At Ford, three of the men on stage had similar characteristics, and were little different than the GM executives. Indeed, there’s nothing that distinguishes Bill Ford from Rick Wagoner to the uninitiated.
Ford had five men on stage, and the other two were physically different. The finance man, Don Leclair, was silver haired and slightly built. Jim Padilla, Ford’s president, was a big man who dwarfed those around him. His bones were big, his shoulders were wide, his skull was large. He’s the only one who came up through the plant floor, and the only one whose body language in a New York Times photograph signaled his disapproval of what he was hearing.
Padilla’s the first to be removed. David Cole tells us, he "helped management reconnect with Ford’s people in the plants and with Ford’s dealers after the chaos of early 2001." Now that the company is closing the plants he salvaged, the company needs someone who will "not get consumed himself in what will be a very difficult process."
Bill Ford is going to use a committee, not someone described as a "fiery" engineer from a Detroit Mexican-Irish family.
Automobiles are about style and performance. Logos and demeanor in public forums distill style into potent symbols. These suggest companies haunted by Henry Ford’s antisemitism and William Durant’s flamboyance, the failure of Edsel and GM models not remembered, companies who’ve spent too many years defining themselves as what they are not.
Now it’s time to define who they are, and they fear strong individuals, who are the only ones who’ve ever made a difference. Instead, they bury themselves in consensus. No doubt public relations advisors submit logos to focus groups to identify anything that might put off some customer. Likewise, experts no doubt suggest how men should dress, based on research like that of James Molloy on how people respond to clothing.
Committees may avoid failure, conformity may reassure Wall Street; they don’t guarantee success and they obviously don’t sell cars.
Sources:
Cole, David. Quoted by Tom Walsh, "Ford president Jim Padilla to retire," Detroit Free Press,
6 April 2006.
Ford plant closing photographs, Fabrizio Costantini, The New York Times, 24 January 2006, and The Detroit News, 24 January 2006.
GMAC sale photograph, Rebecca Cook, Reuters, The Detroit News, 3 April 2006.
Molloy, John T. Dress for Success, 1975.
York, Jerry. Photograph, Jeff Kowalski, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 3 - Heroes
Conspiracy is a popular explanation for events. However, the theory seems to have little basis in reality.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 2 - Blackmail
Corporate culture takes many forms, but genuine narrative traditions are rare. At Shatterproof Glass and my last employer, folk tales formed in irrational environments where management occasionally acted in ways that benefited employees. The paternalistic company produced a trickster tradition to explain the old man who ran the company, while the caste bound company fomented a conspiratorial belief that any incompetent who survived did so only because he, or she, had the goods on someone.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Failure - Part 3 - Sociology
Plans to manage failure always mystify me. When I was told 80% of the data processing systems were never completed, I wondered where the numbers came from. The manufacturing shops were I’d worked were too small to tolerate that level of performance.
Shatterproof Glass could never afford trained programmers. When it needed computer systems, it tested some clerks and taught the ones with the most aptitude. They wrote the payroll and accounting systems from scratch, and people always got paid.
When I was there, it needed to modify most of its programs because the size of our part number had changed. It was the 1970s when car windows were introduced in new colors like gray and manufacturers were experimenting with thinner glass to reduce weight. The existing industry standard code no longer worked.
The only reason that project failed was the owner forced a strike by office workers, then moved the plant to North Carolina.
Mark Controls near Chicago had some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. When they needed to replace their computer systems, the project manager worked with key managers to develop a list of key reports and functions. They found the best answer was a commercial package used in another plant.
Once they started work, they had everything operating within six months. That was despite the company president who reacted to Wall Street downgrading its recommendations for the company stock by cutting costs. Where two programmers were supposed to do the work with a project manager, now it was only two working unpaid overtime. The other programmer wasn’t let go; my time was simply charged to existing projects so that new system costs were reduced.
Between Shatterproof and Mark Controls, I worked for a company that failed to implement IBM’s Copics manufacturing management system. Unlike the other companies, the central office was separated from the manufacturing plants. Any implementation planning meetings required travel, which limited them to upper managers who probably had other priorities when they visited the home office.
Our DP manager took to sleeping on a sofa in the lounge to develop an implementation plan, while the rest of us sat around for days doing nothing. The average programmer tenure in that period was 6 months. In the end, the company cancelled the project and outsourced the DP functions.
One other place I worked implemented new systems despite the owners. The project leader wanted his team to assess general requirements. The owners refused to wait, and asked another programmer to write on demand. Then, the owners fired the DP managers, and left the rest of us to rewrite the code they had ordered. At least we had some idea how it should function and could convert it into something more flexible. Turnover there was soon high.
In my last job, the IS department implemented major applications twice in ten years, once when I began and again for the magical year, 2000. Each was successful; most of the users were the same. Even though few were left from the original programing staff, continuity existed within the company.
The third new installation occurred after the contract changed hands and new managers distrusted the hardware they inherited, especially after the manufacturer stopped supporting some of it. Since there was no business justification, they couldn’t get funding for better applications, and so settled for continuing the same service with a different generation of computers.
The new managers didn’t trust the employees they’d inherited and so kept the implementation planning to themselves. Experienced users and programmers were deliberately kept out of the process, so the new company could do it its own way.
It wasn’t a failure, like the Copics experiment, but it satisfied no one. People were not willing to give their time to reimplement what they already had, and so reinforced the IS managers’ decision that his goal was to install everything then let users define what was missing later.
Looking back, failure has not been endemic and it has not been random and it has not been 80%. It correlated with the social structure of the company. Projects were more successful when managers, programmers and users were in the same area and could talk with one another. In those situations programmers developed a sense of how the business operated and could interpret the sometimes vague comments of the users. People at the same level learned one another’s weaknesses and needs.
In places where small group interactions could not exist projects were more likely to fail. The reasons varied: in one place, users were physically separated, in another owners didn’t want underlings to understand the business. More often, companies fear employees who socialize and do everything they can to discourage what they see as time wasting gossip that might be about them.
Companies who distrusted their employees were the ones who thought about managing failure because they continually experienced it and, unwittingly, perpetuated it.
Shatterproof Glass could never afford trained programmers. When it needed computer systems, it tested some clerks and taught the ones with the most aptitude. They wrote the payroll and accounting systems from scratch, and people always got paid.
When I was there, it needed to modify most of its programs because the size of our part number had changed. It was the 1970s when car windows were introduced in new colors like gray and manufacturers were experimenting with thinner glass to reduce weight. The existing industry standard code no longer worked.
The only reason that project failed was the owner forced a strike by office workers, then moved the plant to North Carolina.
Mark Controls near Chicago had some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. When they needed to replace their computer systems, the project manager worked with key managers to develop a list of key reports and functions. They found the best answer was a commercial package used in another plant.
Once they started work, they had everything operating within six months. That was despite the company president who reacted to Wall Street downgrading its recommendations for the company stock by cutting costs. Where two programmers were supposed to do the work with a project manager, now it was only two working unpaid overtime. The other programmer wasn’t let go; my time was simply charged to existing projects so that new system costs were reduced.
Between Shatterproof and Mark Controls, I worked for a company that failed to implement IBM’s Copics manufacturing management system. Unlike the other companies, the central office was separated from the manufacturing plants. Any implementation planning meetings required travel, which limited them to upper managers who probably had other priorities when they visited the home office.
Our DP manager took to sleeping on a sofa in the lounge to develop an implementation plan, while the rest of us sat around for days doing nothing. The average programmer tenure in that period was 6 months. In the end, the company cancelled the project and outsourced the DP functions.
One other place I worked implemented new systems despite the owners. The project leader wanted his team to assess general requirements. The owners refused to wait, and asked another programmer to write on demand. Then, the owners fired the DP managers, and left the rest of us to rewrite the code they had ordered. At least we had some idea how it should function and could convert it into something more flexible. Turnover there was soon high.
In my last job, the IS department implemented major applications twice in ten years, once when I began and again for the magical year, 2000. Each was successful; most of the users were the same. Even though few were left from the original programing staff, continuity existed within the company.
The third new installation occurred after the contract changed hands and new managers distrusted the hardware they inherited, especially after the manufacturer stopped supporting some of it. Since there was no business justification, they couldn’t get funding for better applications, and so settled for continuing the same service with a different generation of computers.
The new managers didn’t trust the employees they’d inherited and so kept the implementation planning to themselves. Experienced users and programmers were deliberately kept out of the process, so the new company could do it its own way.
It wasn’t a failure, like the Copics experiment, but it satisfied no one. People were not willing to give their time to reimplement what they already had, and so reinforced the IS managers’ decision that his goal was to install everything then let users define what was missing later.
Looking back, failure has not been endemic and it has not been random and it has not been 80%. It correlated with the social structure of the company. Projects were more successful when managers, programmers and users were in the same area and could talk with one another. In those situations programmers developed a sense of how the business operated and could interpret the sometimes vague comments of the users. People at the same level learned one another’s weaknesses and needs.
In places where small group interactions could not exist projects were more likely to fail. The reasons varied: in one place, users were physically separated, in another owners didn’t want underlings to understand the business. More often, companies fear employees who socialize and do everything they can to discourage what they see as time wasting gossip that might be about them.
Companies who distrusted their employees were the ones who thought about managing failure because they continually experienced it and, unwittingly, perpetuated it.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Failure - Part 2 - Strategy
Sherlock Holmes, the omniscient, begat Dashiell Hammett whose grandchildren solve problems simply by being themselves, often clueless, but of the right social order. Once the villain could be anyone in the reader’s closest social set; now it is the butler recast as the outsider, the parvenu, the upstart who threatens the status quo with guile.
The cultural transition from the hope for discovering the solution to the pragmatic acceptance of the possible is reflected in data processing. When I began in the 1970s, programmers were supposed to collect all the requirements for a project, then implement them. Every contingency was supposed to be considered. Now, companies buy packages, maybe with consultant services, and bumble through.
The goal of the perfect application written by employees was well neigh impossible, and often produced systems that were far more complicated than necessary. One critical problem was that one person was supposed to talk to users about their needs; design, write and test code; write documentation and do training.
An equally serious problem was that it assumed users could articulate what they wanted. Since many found it difficult to extract the general from the day-to-day, one either found people who talked grand rhetoric with no details, or found people could not be found. Words like "blue sky" and "bells and whistles" became common, and were to be avoided.
Programmers were either trained in math departments or community colleges. Both focused on teaching how to code, the one with more emphasis on theory, elegance and efficiency. Few taught students to do user documentation or training. And certainly, no one offered classes in interviewing techniques, not even for anthropologists or social workers.
Companies began to talk about how to manage failure. At my last job, our customer sent us a video that told us more than 80% of the information systems projects were never completed. The rest weren’t what was needed, came in late and/or were over budget. I don’t remember if the sample was government projects or projects in general, local or national in scope.
The perception that managers were handling failure prone projects caused by creative individuals like Holmes has persisted. My last supervisor loved to tell me the problem for GM was that engineers would spend too much money creating the perfect vehicle if left alone. It was the duty of a good manager to keep them under control. He, of course, had never worked in Detroit, and was passing on received wisdom. The memorat probably goes back to Frederick Donner who was chairman in the 1960s.
In that last shop, my supervisor’s managers believed a new release of an application should be installed exactly as it already existed. Then, in a later phase, users could request some of the added features. He couldn’t make them understand that not planning for those changes meant implementation decisions were made that made some enhancements impossible.
Users were unhappy in the 1970s and are still unhappy, but the costs in the last shop were exactly as predicted. Higher level managers who look at budgets were happy, even as they blamed their subordinates who couldn’t produce desired reports. The costs for the future change were the problem of the next manager. A new phrase appeared, "foul up, move up."
In the planning phase, my supervisor created a set of specifications which I was supposed to read to the users. He modeled it on the list of requirements provided by the purchased package he hoped would be chosen. He told me I could not add anything, even if it was what someone needed, because the salesman would get too creative and use any modifications as an excuse to raise the price.
I persisted in the old-fashioned methods and asked the man who ran the warehouses how he wanted to run his operation. I told him, nothing he wanted was likely to be in the application, but if we didn’t know what he wanted, it would be difficult to plan a future transition path. My underlying purpose was to get him to talk about his department in concrete terms so he would pay attention to the predigested specification. I was taken off the project.
Once the application was installed, the inventory manager wanted to know why he couldn’t change his costing method, and discovered what he wanted was not available. The already contracted vendor was more than happy to quote a price to write the code, and he somehow managed to convince whoever controlled the budget to sign the contract addendum. Then he left before it was available. The supervisor had already gone, and the IS managers had been replaced.
Failure was transformed from a problem into a marketing strategy. The software company would charge us the full cost of development. If other companies asked for the same thing, they could make minor modifications and recharge them for development costs. If the modifications were useful they could introduce it in a future release with no development costs.
Failure became an ad hoc means of defining user requirements. Programmers were told to convert all existing reports, but not find out if they were used.. The assumption was that if something was important, users would tell them when it was missing, and that would set the priorities.
Needless to say, report problems were never discovered until they were needed, and the programmers lived in constant crisis. When they stayed late to get something ready for the next morning, the success of the department was highly visible. Managers hoped their responsiveness would disguise their failure to plan; if not, replacing a programmer would show their willingness to improve.
All that happened in the years between the time I worked for Shatterproof and my last shop is expectations for programmers were lowered, and, hopefully expectations by users were lowered to an equal level. Once the goal was set at the attainable, success was guaranteed, especially if the initial costs were kept within budget.
The cultural transition from the hope for discovering the solution to the pragmatic acceptance of the possible is reflected in data processing. When I began in the 1970s, programmers were supposed to collect all the requirements for a project, then implement them. Every contingency was supposed to be considered. Now, companies buy packages, maybe with consultant services, and bumble through.
The goal of the perfect application written by employees was well neigh impossible, and often produced systems that were far more complicated than necessary. One critical problem was that one person was supposed to talk to users about their needs; design, write and test code; write documentation and do training.
An equally serious problem was that it assumed users could articulate what they wanted. Since many found it difficult to extract the general from the day-to-day, one either found people who talked grand rhetoric with no details, or found people could not be found. Words like "blue sky" and "bells and whistles" became common, and were to be avoided.
Programmers were either trained in math departments or community colleges. Both focused on teaching how to code, the one with more emphasis on theory, elegance and efficiency. Few taught students to do user documentation or training. And certainly, no one offered classes in interviewing techniques, not even for anthropologists or social workers.
Companies began to talk about how to manage failure. At my last job, our customer sent us a video that told us more than 80% of the information systems projects were never completed. The rest weren’t what was needed, came in late and/or were over budget. I don’t remember if the sample was government projects or projects in general, local or national in scope.
The perception that managers were handling failure prone projects caused by creative individuals like Holmes has persisted. My last supervisor loved to tell me the problem for GM was that engineers would spend too much money creating the perfect vehicle if left alone. It was the duty of a good manager to keep them under control. He, of course, had never worked in Detroit, and was passing on received wisdom. The memorat probably goes back to Frederick Donner who was chairman in the 1960s.
In that last shop, my supervisor’s managers believed a new release of an application should be installed exactly as it already existed. Then, in a later phase, users could request some of the added features. He couldn’t make them understand that not planning for those changes meant implementation decisions were made that made some enhancements impossible.
Users were unhappy in the 1970s and are still unhappy, but the costs in the last shop were exactly as predicted. Higher level managers who look at budgets were happy, even as they blamed their subordinates who couldn’t produce desired reports. The costs for the future change were the problem of the next manager. A new phrase appeared, "foul up, move up."
In the planning phase, my supervisor created a set of specifications which I was supposed to read to the users. He modeled it on the list of requirements provided by the purchased package he hoped would be chosen. He told me I could not add anything, even if it was what someone needed, because the salesman would get too creative and use any modifications as an excuse to raise the price.
I persisted in the old-fashioned methods and asked the man who ran the warehouses how he wanted to run his operation. I told him, nothing he wanted was likely to be in the application, but if we didn’t know what he wanted, it would be difficult to plan a future transition path. My underlying purpose was to get him to talk about his department in concrete terms so he would pay attention to the predigested specification. I was taken off the project.
Once the application was installed, the inventory manager wanted to know why he couldn’t change his costing method, and discovered what he wanted was not available. The already contracted vendor was more than happy to quote a price to write the code, and he somehow managed to convince whoever controlled the budget to sign the contract addendum. Then he left before it was available. The supervisor had already gone, and the IS managers had been replaced.
Failure was transformed from a problem into a marketing strategy. The software company would charge us the full cost of development. If other companies asked for the same thing, they could make minor modifications and recharge them for development costs. If the modifications were useful they could introduce it in a future release with no development costs.
Failure became an ad hoc means of defining user requirements. Programmers were told to convert all existing reports, but not find out if they were used.. The assumption was that if something was important, users would tell them when it was missing, and that would set the priorities.
Needless to say, report problems were never discovered until they were needed, and the programmers lived in constant crisis. When they stayed late to get something ready for the next morning, the success of the department was highly visible. Managers hoped their responsiveness would disguise their failure to plan; if not, replacing a programmer would show their willingness to improve.
All that happened in the years between the time I worked for Shatterproof and my last shop is expectations for programmers were lowered, and, hopefully expectations by users were lowered to an equal level. Once the goal was set at the attainable, success was guaranteed, especially if the initial costs were kept within budget.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Culture Consultans - Part 3 - History
Cultures often have origin myths. Such narratives existed in the two companies I worked, where consultants convinced managers they could eliminate self-destructive behavior. No single story was retold, refashioned into folk art, but shared history existed as a common font of experience that could be referred to with truncated parables and mottos.
In Detroit, one absorbs legendary names and motifs growing up. At the other place, the company retold its key story during its first attempt to address safety and security problems. Indeed during those early days of organization-wide video training, it was the only transmission that was slowed by too many viewers. By the time the culture consultants arrived, many had refreshed their memories, and some used the legend as a mantle to cloak their obstreperousness.
Creation myths do not exist everywhere. In most places I’ve work, people don’t even know the name of the founder, and the most typical narrative is bureaucratic gossip. In Detroit, the legends are recognized by their first names: Michael Moore filmed Roger and Me; Harry Bennett wrote We Never Called Him Henry, a furrier advertised with imagined conversations between Roger and Ross, then Roger and Roger. The caste organization used only last names.
Cultures are rarely homogenous. Most contain competing elements which may be channeled through social structures like clans who alternate power, like the summer people and winter people. Folk narratives often recall past incidents of conflict that disturbed the equilibrium before suggesting ideal solutions.
In Detroit, internal stresses are most clearly seen with Henry Ford. When he first succeeded, his investors criticized him because they believed automobiles would only exist as luxury vehicles. When Ford wouldn’t compromise, they changed to Henry Leland and formed Cadillac Automobile Company in 1902 with the belief the best way to operate was high profits on few sales. William Durant absorbed them into General Motors which he organized to sell different styles to different markets. When he proved too flamboyant, the banks took over.
Ford reorganized and introduced the Model T in 1908. After a few years, his partners, John and Horace Dodge, rebelled because they believed Ford sacrificed quality to quantity. When they died from prohibition alcohol, bankers absorbed their company into what became Chrysler.
Ford reorganized and avoided banks.
When Roger Smith became head of General Motors in 1980, it had a long organizational tradition of selecting the chairman from financial men, the president from production men. Lee Iacocca could never do more at Ford because the family held the top spot. His success at Chrysler violated this industry wide compromise between cost and quality, but was prompted by the only crisis financial men understand, bankruptcy.
Smith faced the same challenges and tried, at least with Saturn and Fiero, to shift the balance towards quality and inexpensive products. His greatest opposition came from those descended from Leland who believed the best strategy was expensive vehicles like Cadillacs and pick-up trucks with low production costs.
Smith’s replacement, like Iacocca, violated the stasis between the groups. Robert Stemple was the first man to rise to chairman from production. He was widely seen in the ranks as the last, best chance to turn things around. When he was forced out in 1992, the company pursued the low cost, high priced strategy with SUVs that haven’t survived market saturation, safety problems, and high operating costs anymore than American vehicles did during the oil embargo of the 1970s.
The collective history at my last employer evolved during a period of heightened national security. Most tales goes back to early conflicts between the military, seen as dampening parasites, and technocrats who saw themselves as creative overachievers.
The conflict between the moieties receded when national priorities changed. The subcontractor where I worked continued to hire retired military men, but they were ones who had learned the way to promotion was to do what was expected. They were seen as harmless tokens, since the customer was happy to pay us to relieve it of the need to hire them to appease a critical constituency.
The equipoise was disturbed when reporters made safety and security problems sound intractable. Suddenly the customer’s customer saw a military man as the only solution. It was a time when corporations were recruiting generals and admirals for top spots to exploit their contacts for contracts. By coincidence, our subcontract brought in a military refugee as our business manager.
Unlike previous military retirees, the new men were ones who believed their role was to give orders, and take action when they were disobeyed. Their first response was mass meetings where they could abuse us as a group, and make implied threats to shape up or ship out. Since any military man is available because he is not going to rise any higher in the Pentagon, the men were ones who knew how to give orders but not how to develop strategies to be obeyed.
Their actions awakened dormant emotions. In some cases, among children who had grown up in abusive environments, the response was instinctive. Among others, it recalled the cultural conflicts of the early years.
The military men couldn’t deal with civilians who simply did not share their institutional history. At out customers shop, it was the military man who was replaced, but not without more threats by our customer’s customer that it had to change or worse would come its way.
In our layer of their caste world, we were the ones delegated to act out their drama for them, and so our military manager is one of the few men brought in by the subcontractor who has survived. The contractor isn’t concerned that he has made mistakes; perhaps, to reinforce its superiority, he’s supposed to. It cares less that he has fired or forced so many out; as an organization we are its inferior, and anyone within our institution is, by definition, subordinate to the counterpart in the parent organization, and expendable to its function.
Indeed many were probably glad he removed so many. During the interregnum when no one was running parts of the subcontract, people who had talent and experience rose, and became counterparts to people at the customer’s who would never mix with the social groups they represented. They were as disruptive to the tribal structure as Lee Iacocca and Robert Stemple, and their removal reinstated the prelapsarian balance.
The result in both Detroit and where I last worked is a heightened sense that dualistic vertical organizations have bifurcated into the masses who know there are problems and leaders who have no idea how to solve them. Estrangement strains the institutions, but not the historically inherited analysis of the situations. The contours of the cultures are clear in the crises that won’t go away.
In Detroit, one absorbs legendary names and motifs growing up. At the other place, the company retold its key story during its first attempt to address safety and security problems. Indeed during those early days of organization-wide video training, it was the only transmission that was slowed by too many viewers. By the time the culture consultants arrived, many had refreshed their memories, and some used the legend as a mantle to cloak their obstreperousness.
Creation myths do not exist everywhere. In most places I’ve work, people don’t even know the name of the founder, and the most typical narrative is bureaucratic gossip. In Detroit, the legends are recognized by their first names: Michael Moore filmed Roger and Me; Harry Bennett wrote We Never Called Him Henry, a furrier advertised with imagined conversations between Roger and Ross, then Roger and Roger. The caste organization used only last names.
Cultures are rarely homogenous. Most contain competing elements which may be channeled through social structures like clans who alternate power, like the summer people and winter people. Folk narratives often recall past incidents of conflict that disturbed the equilibrium before suggesting ideal solutions.
In Detroit, internal stresses are most clearly seen with Henry Ford. When he first succeeded, his investors criticized him because they believed automobiles would only exist as luxury vehicles. When Ford wouldn’t compromise, they changed to Henry Leland and formed Cadillac Automobile Company in 1902 with the belief the best way to operate was high profits on few sales. William Durant absorbed them into General Motors which he organized to sell different styles to different markets. When he proved too flamboyant, the banks took over.
Ford reorganized and introduced the Model T in 1908. After a few years, his partners, John and Horace Dodge, rebelled because they believed Ford sacrificed quality to quantity. When they died from prohibition alcohol, bankers absorbed their company into what became Chrysler.
Ford reorganized and avoided banks.
When Roger Smith became head of General Motors in 1980, it had a long organizational tradition of selecting the chairman from financial men, the president from production men. Lee Iacocca could never do more at Ford because the family held the top spot. His success at Chrysler violated this industry wide compromise between cost and quality, but was prompted by the only crisis financial men understand, bankruptcy.
Smith faced the same challenges and tried, at least with Saturn and Fiero, to shift the balance towards quality and inexpensive products. His greatest opposition came from those descended from Leland who believed the best strategy was expensive vehicles like Cadillacs and pick-up trucks with low production costs.
Smith’s replacement, like Iacocca, violated the stasis between the groups. Robert Stemple was the first man to rise to chairman from production. He was widely seen in the ranks as the last, best chance to turn things around. When he was forced out in 1992, the company pursued the low cost, high priced strategy with SUVs that haven’t survived market saturation, safety problems, and high operating costs anymore than American vehicles did during the oil embargo of the 1970s.
The collective history at my last employer evolved during a period of heightened national security. Most tales goes back to early conflicts between the military, seen as dampening parasites, and technocrats who saw themselves as creative overachievers.
The conflict between the moieties receded when national priorities changed. The subcontractor where I worked continued to hire retired military men, but they were ones who had learned the way to promotion was to do what was expected. They were seen as harmless tokens, since the customer was happy to pay us to relieve it of the need to hire them to appease a critical constituency.
The equipoise was disturbed when reporters made safety and security problems sound intractable. Suddenly the customer’s customer saw a military man as the only solution. It was a time when corporations were recruiting generals and admirals for top spots to exploit their contacts for contracts. By coincidence, our subcontract brought in a military refugee as our business manager.
Unlike previous military retirees, the new men were ones who believed their role was to give orders, and take action when they were disobeyed. Their first response was mass meetings where they could abuse us as a group, and make implied threats to shape up or ship out. Since any military man is available because he is not going to rise any higher in the Pentagon, the men were ones who knew how to give orders but not how to develop strategies to be obeyed.
Their actions awakened dormant emotions. In some cases, among children who had grown up in abusive environments, the response was instinctive. Among others, it recalled the cultural conflicts of the early years.
The military men couldn’t deal with civilians who simply did not share their institutional history. At out customers shop, it was the military man who was replaced, but not without more threats by our customer’s customer that it had to change or worse would come its way.
In our layer of their caste world, we were the ones delegated to act out their drama for them, and so our military manager is one of the few men brought in by the subcontractor who has survived. The contractor isn’t concerned that he has made mistakes; perhaps, to reinforce its superiority, he’s supposed to. It cares less that he has fired or forced so many out; as an organization we are its inferior, and anyone within our institution is, by definition, subordinate to the counterpart in the parent organization, and expendable to its function.
Indeed many were probably glad he removed so many. During the interregnum when no one was running parts of the subcontract, people who had talent and experience rose, and became counterparts to people at the customer’s who would never mix with the social groups they represented. They were as disruptive to the tribal structure as Lee Iacocca and Robert Stemple, and their removal reinstated the prelapsarian balance.
The result in both Detroit and where I last worked is a heightened sense that dualistic vertical organizations have bifurcated into the masses who know there are problems and leaders who have no idea how to solve them. Estrangement strains the institutions, but not the historically inherited analysis of the situations. The contours of the cultures are clear in the crises that won’t go away.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology
Culture has become an easy explanation for organizational problems that seem impervious to correction. Unfortunately, consultants assume, because anthropologists seek commonalities that characterize cultures, that different cultures will respond to the same influences in the same ways. They argue an approach proven in one company will work in another.
The two places I worked where culture consultants were hired had serious safety incidents while I was employed. Their responses were very different. At GM, three men wore safety harnesses to work on a roof on a weekend. One slipped over the edge; his weight pulled over a second man. The third managed to save himself, but the others died.
When I came in Monday morning, the news left a collective sense of being kicked in the gut. It created one of those cracks in time when, for a brief moment, people relieve their anxieties about dangers of the job by talking about previous accidents. No doubt, investigations were done, but those of us who had no direct involvement heard no more. It wasn’t covered up, so much as handled by the appropriate people.
At the last place I worked, an electrician drilled into conduit protecting live wires and survives in a vegetative state. People heard the news with the same detachment they exhibited when they heard the name of the person killed in the morning commute. It was personal: if one knew the man or his family, the response was sympathetic; if not, it was simply news.
A few weeks later, my supervisor told me we were in trouble because our customer’s customer was angry at being embarrassed by questions about the electrocution. When that was followed by other serious incidents, our customer had all its employees and subcontractors watch videos by the accident investigation teams.
Embarrassment is a social response, not an empathetic one. At the GM plant, everyone immediately sensed the horror of the accident, but was not involved in the investigation. At the other place, few were touched by the accident, but management involved us all in its aftermath. The first was a spontaneous shared cultural emotion, the other an imposed social experience.
GM plants hired consultants to address quality problems because it was suddenly less competitive; the other hired them to change the safety culture to counter bad publicity. GM is a conformist environment. No new car ever made it from the drawing board to the showroom without many people working together over time. In my last job, our customer succeeded on the work of talented individuals who had team support, but each team member was biding his or her time until he or she could lead his or her own team to make his or her own contribution.
Problems in the one place were seen as having group solutions; when men groused privately, men on the line blamed engineers, who blamed bean counters, who blamed the next group, and so on up the organization, until the unions were blamed. At the other place, the problem would always be traced to a single individual who needed to be punished. Any patterns in problems were dismissed as coincidence.
The GM plants hired trainers to help small groups think differently about something employees recognized as critical. At the latter place, managers brought in consultants to change the ways individuals behave to solve problems many saw as peripheral to the company’s purpose.
At GM, quality training for salaried employees took a few hours on several days. At the other, all salaried employees sat through three consecutive days of safety management. The one accommodated attendees who still had regular work to do. The other preempted work. Many had to return to their desks and put in unpaid overtime to keep critical work flowing. Resentment existed before the first word was spoken.
The safety consultants took the words "shared beliefs" as their gospel text, and suggested the way to deal with the culture problem was to break down barriers between groups by bringing us together in classes that deliberately mixed us with our customers, secretaries with managers. Much of time was spent in small-group, team building sessions whose only purpose seemed to be to stretch a thin presentation. They compounded their error when they included a video by a man who caused a refinery fire when he didn’t follow procedures.
Their solutions failed the common sense test. They suggested procedures for governing dangerous employees’ behavior, so it would be safe to work with them. Everyone who’d ever worked with such men had a simpler answer: keep them off my job. Customers would tell us people we could never send to their area again, and, no doubt, ways were found within the unions to isolate those seen as accidents waiting to happen.
GM is highly stratified, but its along class lines. It’s been decades since a man rose from the shop floor to the fourteenth, and many think people at the top are increasing isolated from the realities of the market. Still, it’s possible for the son of a union man to rise within the organization, to make a big jump in two generations.
My last employer had a caste structure. No one ever rose from a skilled trades job to a high administrative one; few children rose into the ranks of technocrats. Each layer drew its members from different schools, different communities. The only mobility was from the trades to low level clerical or technician’s jobs, or from high level technocrats to higher level administrators.
The consultants’ root problem was confusing anthropologists with sociologists, who would have identified groups then targeted training for them, thereby flattering their importance. Once the training was done with the wrong methods to solve the wrong problem, there was no way management could salvage the situation except to change its approach. Instead, it confused ego with effectiveness, and asserted it had to be right.
When security problems were perceived as analogous to safety ones, its only answer was to raise the stakes by bringing someone in with the directive to make it happen or else. That man left a meeting where he’d been humiliated by questions about security to hold a video conference for our customers and us. He berated us for an hour, but offered no analysis of our problems and proposed no solutions. When people complained about the style, his supporters said our expectations for common courtesy were part of the culture that had to be changed.
When our customer’s managers conflated two kinds of problems, the one critical to the survival of the organization, the other important but tangential, they doomed everyone, themselves and their employees, to perpetuating responses that didn’t work - more training met more resistence, resulting in more distrust and more frustration.
When new people come in with assignments to reform an organization, people want to know if they’re serious. GM asked "can he walk the walk?" At the more individualistic place, people waited to see if anyone was fired. Earlier, when a new man came into our subcontract and offered an open door, he got an earful, and responded he wasn’t just going to fire people. No one bothered him again.
When the customer did fire people, complaints increased because department heads were held responsible, not individual miscreants. When men actually went to jail, they were dismissed as rare bad apples, not genuinely representative of the organization. Then the man who instituted the removals was himself removed, because his tactics had further embarrassed his customer.
We were back where we started, with problems without solutions, but saddled with people vindicated by resistence to change. Within its closed world, our customer is like GM when it removed Robert Stemple in 1992, and like GM then it has an increasingly unhappy customer who will find other ways
The two places I worked where culture consultants were hired had serious safety incidents while I was employed. Their responses were very different. At GM, three men wore safety harnesses to work on a roof on a weekend. One slipped over the edge; his weight pulled over a second man. The third managed to save himself, but the others died.
When I came in Monday morning, the news left a collective sense of being kicked in the gut. It created one of those cracks in time when, for a brief moment, people relieve their anxieties about dangers of the job by talking about previous accidents. No doubt, investigations were done, but those of us who had no direct involvement heard no more. It wasn’t covered up, so much as handled by the appropriate people.
At the last place I worked, an electrician drilled into conduit protecting live wires and survives in a vegetative state. People heard the news with the same detachment they exhibited when they heard the name of the person killed in the morning commute. It was personal: if one knew the man or his family, the response was sympathetic; if not, it was simply news.
A few weeks later, my supervisor told me we were in trouble because our customer’s customer was angry at being embarrassed by questions about the electrocution. When that was followed by other serious incidents, our customer had all its employees and subcontractors watch videos by the accident investigation teams.
Embarrassment is a social response, not an empathetic one. At the GM plant, everyone immediately sensed the horror of the accident, but was not involved in the investigation. At the other place, few were touched by the accident, but management involved us all in its aftermath. The first was a spontaneous shared cultural emotion, the other an imposed social experience.
GM plants hired consultants to address quality problems because it was suddenly less competitive; the other hired them to change the safety culture to counter bad publicity. GM is a conformist environment. No new car ever made it from the drawing board to the showroom without many people working together over time. In my last job, our customer succeeded on the work of talented individuals who had team support, but each team member was biding his or her time until he or she could lead his or her own team to make his or her own contribution.
Problems in the one place were seen as having group solutions; when men groused privately, men on the line blamed engineers, who blamed bean counters, who blamed the next group, and so on up the organization, until the unions were blamed. At the other place, the problem would always be traced to a single individual who needed to be punished. Any patterns in problems were dismissed as coincidence.
The GM plants hired trainers to help small groups think differently about something employees recognized as critical. At the latter place, managers brought in consultants to change the ways individuals behave to solve problems many saw as peripheral to the company’s purpose.
At GM, quality training for salaried employees took a few hours on several days. At the other, all salaried employees sat through three consecutive days of safety management. The one accommodated attendees who still had regular work to do. The other preempted work. Many had to return to their desks and put in unpaid overtime to keep critical work flowing. Resentment existed before the first word was spoken.
The safety consultants took the words "shared beliefs" as their gospel text, and suggested the way to deal with the culture problem was to break down barriers between groups by bringing us together in classes that deliberately mixed us with our customers, secretaries with managers. Much of time was spent in small-group, team building sessions whose only purpose seemed to be to stretch a thin presentation. They compounded their error when they included a video by a man who caused a refinery fire when he didn’t follow procedures.
Their solutions failed the common sense test. They suggested procedures for governing dangerous employees’ behavior, so it would be safe to work with them. Everyone who’d ever worked with such men had a simpler answer: keep them off my job. Customers would tell us people we could never send to their area again, and, no doubt, ways were found within the unions to isolate those seen as accidents waiting to happen.
GM is highly stratified, but its along class lines. It’s been decades since a man rose from the shop floor to the fourteenth, and many think people at the top are increasing isolated from the realities of the market. Still, it’s possible for the son of a union man to rise within the organization, to make a big jump in two generations.
My last employer had a caste structure. No one ever rose from a skilled trades job to a high administrative one; few children rose into the ranks of technocrats. Each layer drew its members from different schools, different communities. The only mobility was from the trades to low level clerical or technician’s jobs, or from high level technocrats to higher level administrators.
The consultants’ root problem was confusing anthropologists with sociologists, who would have identified groups then targeted training for them, thereby flattering their importance. Once the training was done with the wrong methods to solve the wrong problem, there was no way management could salvage the situation except to change its approach. Instead, it confused ego with effectiveness, and asserted it had to be right.
When security problems were perceived as analogous to safety ones, its only answer was to raise the stakes by bringing someone in with the directive to make it happen or else. That man left a meeting where he’d been humiliated by questions about security to hold a video conference for our customers and us. He berated us for an hour, but offered no analysis of our problems and proposed no solutions. When people complained about the style, his supporters said our expectations for common courtesy were part of the culture that had to be changed.
When our customer’s managers conflated two kinds of problems, the one critical to the survival of the organization, the other important but tangential, they doomed everyone, themselves and their employees, to perpetuating responses that didn’t work - more training met more resistence, resulting in more distrust and more frustration.
When new people come in with assignments to reform an organization, people want to know if they’re serious. GM asked "can he walk the walk?" At the more individualistic place, people waited to see if anyone was fired. Earlier, when a new man came into our subcontract and offered an open door, he got an earful, and responded he wasn’t just going to fire people. No one bothered him again.
When the customer did fire people, complaints increased because department heads were held responsible, not individual miscreants. When men actually went to jail, they were dismissed as rare bad apples, not genuinely representative of the organization. Then the man who instituted the removals was himself removed, because his tactics had further embarrassed his customer.
We were back where we started, with problems without solutions, but saddled with people vindicated by resistence to change. Within its closed world, our customer is like GM when it removed Robert Stemple in 1992, and like GM then it has an increasingly unhappy customer who will find other ways
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Culture Consultants - Part 1 - Psychology
Consultants use the word culture to market their services. When I worked at General Motors in the 1980s, problems existed with quality and competitiveness; where I last worked, safety and security were impediments to survival. In both places, consultants convinced managers the problem was workers’ attitudes that could be altered with training. In both places, they failed. And, in both places, there were genuine problems that needed to be addressed that could, indeed, be traced to attitudes.
The problem with the proposed solution is that attitudes are as much psychological phenomena as anthropological ones. If we looked at Chernobyl, we would see safety problems that transcended the cultures of the United States and Soviet Russia, and might conclude the difficulty of following detailed instructions was something inherent in human nature. But, if we looked at Japan, we would see quality problems eliminated by social organization, and deduce culture moderated the influence of innate psychological responses.
When I was in school, our simple definition of culture was "shared patterns of human behavior and belief that were learned." Once analysts framed problems as anthropological ones, solutions followed from the word "learned." If consultants had framed them in psychological terms, they would have had to deal with motives or incentives. That is a far more complex problem to solve, and consultants who tried it years ago failed.
Before workers are going to accept they are the ones who need to adapt, they need to be convinced there’s a problem. It helps if they can believe in the proposed solution. We know from the disappearance of societies in the Easter Islands and Greenland that even in the severest crises, people may not recognize the need or human capacity for change, and will die to maintain cultural and personal consistency.
In the two GM plants where I worked in the 1980s, people did adapt Japanese ideas both because they feared their plants would close and because they knew who was more successful at selling cars. Their biggest problem was perpetuating their innovations. Over time, they had to accept workers from other lines who had not been part of the original experiment because they weren’t as amenable to correction but had seniority to bid when jobs opened.
The more serious problem was young managers. Those who came from other locations had no incentive to conform with unique demands of the plants. The formula for promotion was set outside, and meeting the plants’ requirements might hinder future advancement. Indeed, if a place did close, their only hope was applying to another, now suspicious corporate office.
In both places, many came to see demands for improvement coming from higher level managers who couldn’t sway their immediate subordinates and thus lost credibility. The question became "he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?"
It’s not enough to hire consultants. If a CEO wants divergence, he has to promote a plausible alternative. That’s not the same as sending top executives to some resort to wordsmith a mission statement. Indeed, if a company head knows what he wants, he doesn’t need anyone to tell him.
In 1980, Roger Smith had a vision for General Motors: compensate for problems from unpredictable customers and employees with automation; replace recalcitrant managers and workers with a new company, Saturn; reduce administrative costs by merging five brand names, two manufacturing divisions, and other autonomous groups into three integrated organizations.
As long as Smith addressed problems that were cultural and had clearly defined solutions, he had support. So many wanted to tour his joint venture plant built with Toyota at Fremont, California, it had to limit the number of visitors. When he turned to corporate bureaucracy, he made people apprehensive. Corporate folk wisdom passed through xeroxed graffiti warned the old and cunning would triumph over the young and talented.
Once his demonstration plant in Hamtramack disrupted a local community and he proposed transferring employees to EDS in 1984, the cultural problem became increasingly personal. The threat of economic loss, be it to an engineer or a Detroit area resident, no longer seemed worth the sacrifice after management bungled the introduction of the first car in years to excite customers, the 1984 Fiero.
Smith’s solutions became all stick and no carrot. When individuals’ psychological allegiance with established ways became stronger than with proffered change, GM lost the opportunity to modify its behavior. The other common piece of xeroxed graffiti in those years compared any new project to mating elephants, something that provoked a great deal of stomping and roaring and took many months to produce a small result long after the instigating male had disappeared.
When leaders who promote messianic change fail, those who reject the need for transformation become more entrenched. When Roger Smith retired in 1990, General Motors soon removed Robert Stemple, the man he’d named as his replacement, and sold almost everything he’d introduced.
Now, more than a decade later, the company faces potential bankruptcy, and top managers still think they can ignore suggestions from outsiders. Their best answer is to make investors happy by lowering costs by cutting production, but to satisfy themselves they continue what they’ve been doing in the remaining operations.
Those who recognize there are problems may feel doomed like Norsemen and Easter Islanders abandoned to a fate dictated by those who support the status quo and wonder what it will take to make people with power aware more is required when it’s never their jobs or benefits that are eliminated. Change is still all punishment and no reward.
The problem with the proposed solution is that attitudes are as much psychological phenomena as anthropological ones. If we looked at Chernobyl, we would see safety problems that transcended the cultures of the United States and Soviet Russia, and might conclude the difficulty of following detailed instructions was something inherent in human nature. But, if we looked at Japan, we would see quality problems eliminated by social organization, and deduce culture moderated the influence of innate psychological responses.
When I was in school, our simple definition of culture was "shared patterns of human behavior and belief that were learned." Once analysts framed problems as anthropological ones, solutions followed from the word "learned." If consultants had framed them in psychological terms, they would have had to deal with motives or incentives. That is a far more complex problem to solve, and consultants who tried it years ago failed.
Before workers are going to accept they are the ones who need to adapt, they need to be convinced there’s a problem. It helps if they can believe in the proposed solution. We know from the disappearance of societies in the Easter Islands and Greenland that even in the severest crises, people may not recognize the need or human capacity for change, and will die to maintain cultural and personal consistency.
In the two GM plants where I worked in the 1980s, people did adapt Japanese ideas both because they feared their plants would close and because they knew who was more successful at selling cars. Their biggest problem was perpetuating their innovations. Over time, they had to accept workers from other lines who had not been part of the original experiment because they weren’t as amenable to correction but had seniority to bid when jobs opened.
The more serious problem was young managers. Those who came from other locations had no incentive to conform with unique demands of the plants. The formula for promotion was set outside, and meeting the plants’ requirements might hinder future advancement. Indeed, if a place did close, their only hope was applying to another, now suspicious corporate office.
In both places, many came to see demands for improvement coming from higher level managers who couldn’t sway their immediate subordinates and thus lost credibility. The question became "he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?"
It’s not enough to hire consultants. If a CEO wants divergence, he has to promote a plausible alternative. That’s not the same as sending top executives to some resort to wordsmith a mission statement. Indeed, if a company head knows what he wants, he doesn’t need anyone to tell him.
In 1980, Roger Smith had a vision for General Motors: compensate for problems from unpredictable customers and employees with automation; replace recalcitrant managers and workers with a new company, Saturn; reduce administrative costs by merging five brand names, two manufacturing divisions, and other autonomous groups into three integrated organizations.
As long as Smith addressed problems that were cultural and had clearly defined solutions, he had support. So many wanted to tour his joint venture plant built with Toyota at Fremont, California, it had to limit the number of visitors. When he turned to corporate bureaucracy, he made people apprehensive. Corporate folk wisdom passed through xeroxed graffiti warned the old and cunning would triumph over the young and talented.
Once his demonstration plant in Hamtramack disrupted a local community and he proposed transferring employees to EDS in 1984, the cultural problem became increasingly personal. The threat of economic loss, be it to an engineer or a Detroit area resident, no longer seemed worth the sacrifice after management bungled the introduction of the first car in years to excite customers, the 1984 Fiero.
Smith’s solutions became all stick and no carrot. When individuals’ psychological allegiance with established ways became stronger than with proffered change, GM lost the opportunity to modify its behavior. The other common piece of xeroxed graffiti in those years compared any new project to mating elephants, something that provoked a great deal of stomping and roaring and took many months to produce a small result long after the instigating male had disappeared.
When leaders who promote messianic change fail, those who reject the need for transformation become more entrenched. When Roger Smith retired in 1990, General Motors soon removed Robert Stemple, the man he’d named as his replacement, and sold almost everything he’d introduced.
Now, more than a decade later, the company faces potential bankruptcy, and top managers still think they can ignore suggestions from outsiders. Their best answer is to make investors happy by lowering costs by cutting production, but to satisfy themselves they continue what they’ve been doing in the remaining operations.
Those who recognize there are problems may feel doomed like Norsemen and Easter Islanders abandoned to a fate dictated by those who support the status quo and wonder what it will take to make people with power aware more is required when it’s never their jobs or benefits that are eliminated. Change is still all punishment and no reward.
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