Michael Hammer states that, Most companies today – no matter what business they are in, how technologically sophisticated their product or service, or what their national origin – can trace their work styles and organizational roots back to the prototypical pin factory that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. This new way of working was based on the principle of dividing an enterprise-wide business process of making pins into specialized workers who each performed a single step in the pin-making process. This kind of division of labor (fragmentation of work) into separate tasks increased the productivity of pin makers by a factor of hundreds. Over time, work was broken into smaller and smaller pieces, with groups of people who performed similar functions. Not surprisingly, workers who were successful at performing a given function were natural drawn to these tasks because they had the skills, preferences, and natural talents needed to perform that kind of work. The success created by Adam Smith’s insight powerfully shaped and reinforced this way of doing work in companies, and the roles of individual workers in accomplishing that work. Functional groupings have become collective ways of working that form the organizational design in most modern corporations. In fact, the practice of designing organizations around similar functions has been so engrained into our global culture that most people have never worked in an organization that wasn’t structured around functions. Consequently, many managers and staff members mistakenly believe that organizational structure and organizational functions are synonymous – but they’re not.
Ten Guidelines For Managers Who Want to Create Culture Change
by adminA common perception is that cultural change has to start at the very top of an organization. But studies and field experience have shown that culture change can begin with the sub-culture of a work-group where a manager who is one or two levels down from senior management decides to become an Island of Excellence® in a sea of mediocrity. As objective evidence of believable performance improvement becomes known to other managers, change often goes horizontal across the organization through other work-groups, then up through the line organization to top managers. The Breckenridge Institute® has developed ten guidelines that managers should follow when under-taking this kind of culture change.
Make sure that the changes you propose are in the best interest of the overall organization, not the self-interest of your work-group. Build sustainable capability and infrastructure that benefits the entire organization rather than optimizing your own position and sub-optimizing the organization’s overall performance.
