Are you just tinkering with the systems?

When dealing with the problem of competitiveness, all the people writing and lecturing on the subject appear to agree on one fact. In a time of accelerating change, they argue, it is no good tinkering with existing systems and structures. As the rate of change is likely to increase, the universally held view now is that any organization seeking to become competitive must re-think or re-engineer each business process from scratch.

There are considerable advantages in starting an organization from scratch. When in 1945 the allies assisted West Germany to rebuild its industries, they took many steps that enabled that country to achieve considerable competitive advantage. The British Trade Union movement played its part in creating West Germany’s extraordinary revival by helping to set up a system that effectively resulted in only one union operating in each factory. In this way the West German industry had a sensible union structure which helped to reduce the number of days lost to strikes and disruptions. By comparison, in the decades following World War II, British industry was at a considerable disadvantage from ’demarcation’ and other disputes that were exacerbated by having multiples of unions operating in the same workplace.

Why did the British Trade Union movement not adopt the policy it recommended to West Germany? The obvious answer is that the British union bosses had their empires to protect. Why does management often fail to take difficult decisions during performance improvement projects? Clearly the protection of empires is a major factor.

Starting from scratch is easy if your organization is virtually destroyed by war and reasonably straightforward if a major relocation or reorganization due to acquisitions or mergers is involved. Otherwise it seems most managers are not mentally strong enough or far sighted enough to carry out the changes necessary to put their organizations on a truly competitive footing. It is certainly true to say that fear of failure and other reasons have prevented many managers aiming for targets that they might reasonably have been expected to achieve.