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Are technophobic senior managers a danger to their own company's survival right now?
The survival ‘dog eats dog’ is back in business as the world struggles to recover from the impact of ‘Bush-driven economics’.
Key question – ‘how will business directors ensure continuity and shareholder value in these turgid times?’ An equally valid reply from some US boardrooms could be “But how can you plan to survive when your employees are only productive for one hour per day!” However, I am sure the silence will be deafening on that one!
(Ref: The 2008 US Workplace Productivity Report (Lexis Nexis.com)finds that the average white collar employee’s productivity is no more than 60 minutes per day!)
Hmm, who was in charge of these people over the last 3-5 years? Many questions, few answers, all adding to the need to move rapidly into a recovery position. However, consider this: even if you achieved a 100% increase in productivity, approx.75% of productive time is still being wasted! Time that you cannot afford to be paying for!
So, the hard questions for Directors and Management are. ..
“How lean can we get and still deliver on our customers expectations?”
“What cost savings can we achieve by utilising web-based technology
services (SaaS)?”
But undoubtedly the hardest question is:
“Do we have the right team in place to make a change like this happen?”
Remember Richard Semler, a Brazilian manufacturer, who when taking over a family company, reduced the company bureaucracy by 12 management levels to 3 and changed the working structure from the rigid hierarchical corporate pyramid to fluid concentric circles. He then threw out the territorial offices replacing them with meeting rooms with secretarial support. Today his company booms, experiencing an average of 27.5 % p.a. growth every year for 14 years, through 2 recessions.
This is the type of thinking that we clearly need right now to handle the financial impacts from current events. If you can answer Yes to the question ‘Do we have the right team in place to make the changes we need to make, in the timeframes we need to make them?’ …then you are already moving into position. Good luck!
Key question – ‘how will business directors ensure continuity and shareholder value in these turgid times?’ An equally valid reply from some US boardrooms could be “But how can you plan to survive when your employees are only productive for one hour per day!” However, I am sure the silence will be deafening on that one!
(Ref: The 2008 US Workplace Productivity Report (Lexis Nexis.com)finds that the average white collar employee’s productivity is no more than 60 minutes per day!)
Hmm, who was in charge of these people over the last 3-5 years? Many questions, few answers, all adding to the need to move rapidly into a recovery position. However, consider this: even if you achieved a 100% increase in productivity, approx.75% of productive time is still being wasted! Time that you cannot afford to be paying for!
So, the hard questions for Directors and Management are. ..
“How lean can we get and still deliver on our customers expectations?”
“What cost savings can we achieve by utilising web-based technology
services (SaaS)?”
But undoubtedly the hardest question is:
“Do we have the right team in place to make a change like this happen?”
Remember Richard Semler, a Brazilian manufacturer, who when taking over a family company, reduced the company bureaucracy by 12 management levels to 3 and changed the working structure from the rigid hierarchical corporate pyramid to fluid concentric circles. He then threw out the territorial offices replacing them with meeting rooms with secretarial support. Today his company booms, experiencing an average of 27.5 % p.a. growth every year for 14 years, through 2 recessions.
This is the type of thinking that we clearly need right now to handle the financial impacts from current events. If you can answer Yes to the question ‘Do we have the right team in place to make the changes we need to make, in the timeframes we need to make them?’ …then you are already moving into position. Good luck!
Tags: elearning, audited, business, careers, increased, innovation, leadership, management, monitoring, performance
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jay Cross on -
In a word, Lee, yes. This Friday morning I'll be leading a session at DevLearn about learning in times of economic downturn. I'll have more to report then...
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Permalink Reply by John on
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Lee - Your question in the headline addresses technophobic senior managers, yet you point to Semler's restructuring of physical space and conceptual management layers - both activities that may fall outside technophobia. In fact, my experience has shown (and we can all find examples to agree) that technology can put information in front of us, but frequently the information overwhelms employees on a varying scale of irrelevance. I'd like to take this thread in two directions - one, can technophobia be a danger (yes I believe so) and two, how can business adapt faster to changing conditions (models for management, pricing, channel and sales distribution, customer support, product development and so on) and maybe number three is - how can we adapt learning to relevance. Maybe the broader question for our time is, how can we all adapt ALL information for relevance? With multiple information sources, our task today is to find our concentric circles of interest. (thus this community). But how many communities did I have to sort through to get here? For our business growth, how can we find the customers who need our services faster? How can we customize our services for our customers more appropriately? How can staff just in time training provide skills, knowledge and tools for our teams that is relevant, remembered, and responsive - and I think Jay is on a great plane here that programs must change. We can not afford to be in class for two or three days off the task, but we can obtain skills in real time - as we need it in smaller chunks. One challenge is, can we aggregate learning over time? Another is, can kids who enter the workforce with a mentality of 'instant information' be trained any other way? We may be entering the age of impatience which may have sever consequences for solid, complete knowledge transfer.
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