ALT-5 What’s Wrong with our Companies Today
Companies today can suffer from putting too much faith in the idea of a one-size-fits-all winning formula that will ensure success for anyone anywhere. The result can be a series of trial-and-error restructurings which wastes millions of dollars on false starts, loses valuable employees and traps those who remain on a perpetual learning curve.
Many companies try to adopt the practices of successful corporations despite obvious differences in their size, location and type of industry. Service sector workers, for example, are now squeezed into target systems and assembly-line processing borrowed from manufacturing. Technical experts are herded into creative teams and bank tellers must embrace the dynamism of sales. Imposing these alien and often inappropriate strategies can pull workers further and further away from the jobs they signed up for and what they do best, leaving employees demotivated and their customers bewildered.
The hunt for a winning formula is echoed in a search for winning people. In many organizations, promoting people up through the ranks is now passed over in favor of recruiting outsiders with supposedly transferable skills. Talented managers usually can function well in different environments, but they have added burdens when coming in from outside. Initially, they have to rely on staff to familiarize them with the company and industry where someone promoted from within would already have this expertise. They also arrive as strangers, which tempts many to make immediate changes for change sake as a way to introduce themselves quickly and make their mark.
I think the resounding success of the technology industry has influenced many of these new attitudes. In IT, things do happen at a frenetic rate, products and resources need to be constantly changing, and individual talent can be more important than experience. But this is not necessarily true for hospitality and insurance. Even in a large computer company, what works for developers can't always be transplanted wholesale to the factory floor or finance department.
In short, what I believe is wrong with many companies today is that in chasing after a global success potion, they fail to recognize the unique needs of their own industry, organization and staff.
