Concept
Between roughly 1988 and 1993, General Electric under the guidance of Jack Welch and a team of consultants engaged in an effort to reduce bureaucratic red-tape and speed adaptation to changing economic conditions. Welch called this the “Work Out” initiative. He thought the company needed a work-out to get rid of organizational cholesterol. 30 I was fortunate enough to be a member of the second tier of consultants hired to support that effort. The subsidiary I was assigned to was later named to be one of the top 10 plants in the country by Industry Magazine.31
Welch’s inner group of four consultants devised a change process that was extraordinarily successful. This process had five phases or steps.
1. Describe the current system.
2. Describe the current results.
3. Describe a better system.
4. Describe expected results.
5. Describe a plan for execution.
The concept was that line managers would work with assigned consultants to generate internally a list of things that needed to be done to move the company forward. In this way, the process was both top-down and bottoms-up in design. The process included a series of consultant-led seminars that (a) introduced the theory of managing change (see this whole module), (b) asked participants to work together to develop a list of needed changes, (c) to develop the five overhead slides suggested by the process above, (d) present those initiatives to senior management, e) who in turn would decide on the spot whether to proceed/accept or not.
The power of this process lay in its involvement of research (the consultants), changes (the participants), and senior management and in the directive to decide the fate of each project on the spot.
In the attempt to demonstrate his division’s progress, one GE divisional CEO piled up stacks of paper—bureaucratic red-tape that they had eliminated—in the entry way to his headquarters. In our subsidiary, we identified 205 projects or issues recommended by employees over the course of two years. These projects ranged in importance from changing the uniforms on the softball team to redesigning and shortening the methods by which the company brought new products to market. Can you imagine standing up in front of your senior management and proposing a change in the softball uniforms as your big insight? One proposal described more than a dozen steps required to get a hammer out of the supply room— and a proposal to shorten the process significantly. The larger projects required major planning and additional support mechanisms.
Diagram
Challenge
1. Describe a current system in your organization that you think needs redoing.
2. Describe the results this system produces.
3. Describe a system that you think would improve the current system.
4. Describe the results you would expect the new system to produce.
5. Design a plan to implement this new system, step-by-step.
30 There are many articles and books on this effort. For example, https://amazon.com/dp/B000QUCO9Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
31 https://automation.com/automation-news/industry/ge-fanuc-automation-celebrates-15-year-anniversary