Best Practices
Best Practices of a successful Organization
- People continuously expand their capacity to learn and be productive,
- New patterns of thinking are nurtured,
- Collective aspirations are encouraged, and
- People are encouraged to see the “whole picture” together.
Five disciplines which successful organizations follow are:
- Personal responsibility, self reliance, and mastery— People accept that they are the masters of their own destiny. They make decisions and live with the consequences of that. When a problem needs to be fixed, or an opportunity exploited, they take the initiative to learn the required skills to get it done.
- Mental models— they explore their personal mental models to understand the subtle effect they have on their behavior.
- Shared vision— The vision of where they want to be in the future is discussed and communicated to all. It provides guidance and energy for the journey ahead.
- Team learning— They learn together in teams. This involves a shift from “a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry”.
- Systems Thinking— They look at the whole rather than the parts.
Reasons for unsuccessful Organization
There are many reasons, especially:
- Failure to execute by overcoming the four key organizational hurdle
-> Cognitive hurdle
-> Motivational hurdle
-> Resource hurdle
-> Political hurdle
- Failure to understand the customer
-> Why do they buy
-> Is there a real need for the product
-> inadequate or incorrect marketing research
- Inability to predict environment reaction
-> What will competitors do
- Fighting brands
- Price wars
-> Will government intervene
- Over-estimation of resource competence
-> Can the staff, equipment, and processes handle the new strategy
-> Failure to develop new employee and management skills
- Failure to coordinate
-> Reporting and control relationships not adequate
-> Organizational structure not flexible enough
- Failure to obtain senior management commitment
-> Failure to get management involved right from the start
-> Failure to obtain sufficient company resources to accomplish task
- Failure to obtain employee commitment
-> New strategy not well explained to employees
-> No incentives given to workers to embrace the new strategy
- Under-estimation of time requirements
-> No critical path analysis done
- Failure to follow the plan
-> No follow through after initial planning
-> No tracking of progress against plan
-> No consequences for above
- Failure to manage change
-> Inadequate understanding of the internal resistance to change
-> Lack of vision on the relationships between processes, technology and organization
- Poor communications
- Insufficient information sharing among people
