MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Individual Assessment of
Key Learnings
by
Wayne E. Pauli
A Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements of
OM 812 Management and Organizational Behavior
December 2002
Address: / 805 North OliveCity, State, Zip: / Madison, SD 57042
Phone: / 605-363-9323
E-mail: /
Instructor: / Dr. R. D. O’Connor
Mentor: / TBD
Abstract
Key Learnings in a post graduate PhD course are truly in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, in the eye of the learner. A great deal of outside research was completed to support as well as contradict the findings of authors James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras of Built to Last, and Jerald Greenberg in Managing Behaviors in Organizations. When the dust had settled the topics that provided the greatest opportunity to learn as per this PhD student were: Who or What is Visionary, Culture of High Achieving Organizations, Creativity and Innovation of High Achieving Organizations, The Metaphor of Clock Building, Management Dilemma – Internally or Externally, and The Quest for Leadership. The challenge that then entailed was to form these key topics into a paper with enough cohesiveness in it to make its reading informative, and hopefully educational. Enjoy.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ii
Introduction 1
Who or What is Visionary 2
Culture of High Achieving Organizations 3
Creativity and Innovation of High Achieving Organizations 4
The Metaphor of Clock Building 6
Management Dilemma – Internally or Externally 7
The Quest for Leadership 8
Conclusion 9
Resources 10
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2
Key Learnings from OM 812
Introduction
As I gleaned the course materials on OM 812 Management and Organizational Behavior as instructed by Dr. R.D. O’Connor, I equated ideas such as high achieving, clock building, and visionary to also mean successful. According to Phil Livingston writing for Financial Executive, “The combination of a weak economy and geopolitical turmoil is unpleasant.” (Livingston, 2002) Staffing has gone through layoffs, retirement accounts have been eroded due to our sour financial markets, and we can count on our regulators and legislators to fight over who gets to hang the proverbial pelt over their mantle.
Current economic conditions as described by Livingston do little if anything to foster the desire to study and research the high achieving, visionary company. Perhaps we as students of organization and management should wait until our current economic situation is completed in order to survey what is left.
If we read management literature, we will find advice as to what staff and their respective organizations must do in order to be successful. Author Gareth Morgan states them as follows: Become flexible, Adapt, Self-organize, Thrive on Chaos, Develop a learning organization, Become more creative, Be market driven, Foster entrepreneurship, Empower your staff, and Decentralize. (Morgan, 1997) This is a great list, and many of Morgan’s topics run parallel with Visionary, Clock building, and Grow your own, (Collins, & Porras, 1997) and the Culture, Creativity, and Innovation of high achieving organizations along with the quest for leadership (Greenberg, 2002). Let us proceed with our discussion.
Who or What is Visionary
The concept of visionary is well documented in many periodicals and text books. Seemingly so, each author has his or her definition of whom or what visionary is. To Collins and Porras, visionary contains concepts such as: being the premier institution in an industry, being widely admired, making an indelible imprint on the world, multiple generations of CEO’s, have gone through multiple product life cycles, and be founded prior to 1950. (Collins, & Porras, 1997)
Going against the cases documented in Collins and Porras, I selected Amazon.com as a visionary company, several of the above traits exist in Amazon, but maybe more importantly is the company credo, “Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History” (Louie & Rayport, 2001).
Could visionary also encompass another born on the Internet company, eBay? They sell an article of clothing every three seconds, they sell a laptop computer every thirty seconds, and they sell a diamond ring every six minutes. They have amassed over forty-two million users in six years, they have over four hundred million items for sale, and they had gross profit of over six hundred million dollars on over nine Billion dollars of sales in 2001. (Frei, 2002)
Writing in the October 2002 issue of Financial Executive, Donald L. Laurie states that visionary leaders, in both high and low tech industries, develop organizational capabilities and focus to exploit intellectual property, assets and the creativity and knowledge of their people. (Laurie, 2002)
If Mr. Laurie’s comments sound familiar, this is the plan executed by General Electric, a company on Collins and Porras’ list of visionary companies. The key here is the empowerment of the people, we will talk about this later, and you will come to understand this theme.
Culture of High Achieving Organizations
The culture of high achieving organizations can be thought of as a framework, a framework of assumptions and values that are shared by members (Greenberg, 2002). Greenberg goes on to point out that he feels that values are long-term beliefs about what is important in the organization.
Other authors have a slightly different delivery, but with much of the same focus, consider the following: “Much of the well-known and rigorous organizational management research of the past few generations finds that decision-making is one of the most important functions in organizations.” (Rapp, 2002)
According to Nailesh Bhatt, a management consultant, the replies from organizations to his favorite question about what gives the company a competitive advantage, are very consistent with things like relationships, knowledge, competencies, culture and people. (Bhatt, 2002)
I believe that we can state that culture is all about the people involved. You do not create culture with capital, you create it with people, otherwise Exxon Mobil would be more successful than Microsoft, DuPont would be more successful that Cisco, and Ford would be creating JIT instead of Dell. In each case, the former was very capital intensive; totaling over $195 billion, while the latter’s in each comparison totals only $22 Billion. (Bhatt, 2002) It is about the people, not about the money, and today’s environment of business reorganizations and downsizings is having an adverse effect on the culture developed during the 1990’s, as workforces tend to be less motivated when faced with budget cuts and layoffs. (Messmer, April 2002)
Creativity and Innovation of High Achieving Organizations
Old school thinking was that if you wanted to be creative, you would go to art school, not business school. From a new school perspective, creativity is now deemed a fundamental tool for survival in today’s business environment. (Anonymous, 2002)
The concept of creativity and innovation need be carried no farther than to Dell Computer Company. From their cut out the middleman direct sales to retail, to their integration of Just in Time manufacturing with valuechain.dell.com, Dell has proven that its competitive advantage lies in its ability to be creative and innovative in a very competitive market. (Magretta, 1998)
Mike Frost in HRMagazine states that creative orientation programs are a must. If you want to have creative employees in a creative organization, then make your orientations creative. (Frost, 2002) Within this article, it was cited that only 7% of training dollars went to new employees.
Shira White, a management consultant specializing in innovation states that, “innovation has become a lot more important to corporate leaders because of the changes in the environment.” (Anonymous, 2002) In this area, Ms. White is talking about increased technological capabilities brought about by the Internet.
The message is clear, creativity and innovation are decidedly important to high achieving organizations. In fact in a survey of the nation’s top executives, 89% said employers are more proactively promoting creativity among employees over five years earlier. (Messmer, 2001)
The Metaphor of Clock Building
This metaphor is the one that I found to be the strongest in the entire course. Clock building is a concept that says that successful companies do not become successful because of their leaders that have the characteristics that include charisma (the ability to tell time), but more importantly the characteristics that include hitting a market in the right way, at the right time, and with a new product idea.(Clarke, 1999)
James Collins and Jerry Porras are even more emphatic when they state, “a high profile, charismatic style is not required to successfully shape a visionary company.” (Collins & Porras, 1997)
This is not to say that a charismatic leader cannot lead a high achieving organization, some of our finest examples of visionary companies have had charismatic leaders, people like: Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and now we have people like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Michael Dell of Dell Computers. Oh, and don’t forget about Ted Waitt and his talking cow at Gateway.
Management Dilemma – Internally or Externally
Earlier this year, the healthcare industry surveyed member companies, the survey revealed that 86% of the members have a formal process to develop leaders, and that is really a positive indicator that growing your own is the preferred way to develop management. (Anonymous, Oct 2002)
The negative portion of this survey found that only 8% of the positive respondents felt their program was effective, and 30% think there program is not effective in achieving the desired goals. (Anonymous, Oct 2002)
The healthcare industry is not the only industry that has less than glowing comments for growing your own philosophies. Once giant, and now defunct Enron was a big believer in what they termed their “open market”, which meant that they had internal job fairs for openings, and looked inside first in order to fill openings, a self directed promotion program. (Maccoby, 2002)
Max Messmer, writing in the May 2002 Strategic Finance magazine comments that filling executive level positions is more complex than entry or mid level management positions, as there is an entire new level of expectations, namely: Being a company expert, being a leader, and having great communication skills. (Messmer, 2002)
Early identification of future leaders is paramount, but high unscientific. Whether tomorrow’s leaders are coming from today’s middle management, or from the outside, certain skills need to be necessary, including: honesty, vision, boldness, recognizing the human side of business, and discipline. (Maccoby, 2002)
Once again, pointing out the trials and tribulations of the U.S. and world-wide economies, there may certainly be talented yet partially tarnished executives willing to bring their proven talents to a new working environment at reduced costs.
The Quest for Leadership
Retired Harvard Business School Professor, John P. Kotter understands the quest for leadership, when he simply stated, “Most American institutions are over managed and under-led.” (Staff, 2002) Companies have gone so far as to begin their own universities to demonstrate how critical leadership is to success. (Staff, 2002)
Perhaps exemplifying leadership can come from Amazon.com’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. He does not talk about hours worked or profitability, he talks about fun, and making history. (Louie & Rayport, 2001)
Fun must be an integral part of providing leadership, as John Newstrom in his just published article in the S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal quotes Tom Peters, the coauthor of several best selling business books, “until recently, not a single textbook on management talked about having fun.” (Newstrom, 2002)
Newstrom went on to point out some company leaders that had tremendous sense-of-humors, and tried to create a fun working atmosphere: Herb Kelleher, the CEO of Southwest Airlines, Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. (Newstrom, 2002)
The quest for leadership will continue as long as we strive to have high achieving organizations. Leadership when traced back to 604 BC is still stated in 21st Century terminology: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists”, and “When his work is done, his aim is fulfilled.” (Carpenter, 2002)
“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal.” Spoken like a true leader, this quote could have come from any number of leaders in our history. It is attributed to Walt Disney. (Collins & Porras, 1997)
Conclusion
It is obvious that hard and fast definitions do not really exist for vision, for high achieving, and momentum can be gathered in each direction of the grow your own vs. hire from the outside processes.
We can say that it is difficult to make a leader, and that there is a difference between management and leadership. I think it takes a leader to be a clock builder, and management is more likely to be a time teller.
The important part of this paper is that in some form, these concepts are incorporated in our organizations, and it behooves all of us to have some concept of what our organization is trying to accomplish. We just have to be able to identify these concepts and determine the direction our organization is headed.
References
Staff, (2002 December). Management and Leadership Should Not be Confused. ENR, 249,76
Anonymous, (2002 October). Leadership development not effective. Healthcare Financial Management, 56,25