**IT WOULD HELP TO KNOW WHICH QUESTION NEEDS CLARIFICATION** Please forgive the
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**IT WOULD HELP TO KNOW WHICH QUESTION NEEDS CLARIFICATION**
Please forgive the typing out of this lengthy paper. However, it is my experience that camera shots are less frequent to get response and or needing more information.
A croporation is often associated with the person at the head of the table - so much so that the return of Howard Schultz (Starbucks) is often intended and viewed as a kind of restoration. However, true culture turnaround requires a complete psychological shift across the entire organization. It is relatively easy for new organizations to start with a clean sheet of paper in crating a culture. But for organizations that have been around for a while, the shift involves quite a bit of shedding and rewriting.
How do log-established compaanies make this transformation? How do they understand the need to change and create energy and urgency around it? How do they match a shift in strategy (which is called for in times of change) with a shift in culture? I suspect that many organizations get into trouble not because of a failed strategy but because of a frozen culture. If this hypothesis is true, how do we make culture chage a lever for growth as oppsed to taking it as a given?
At GE, we have stayed competitive for more than 130years because of our reletless quest for progress on all fronts, including culture. We believe that there is no such thing as a 130-year culture. In our opionion, culture is contextual, and what would have been appropriate in the 19th century, when the cmpany was a one-product, one-century organization, is very inappropriate in today's far more globalized environment. (GE now operates in 175 countries across the globe.) So a constant reengineering of ouor business portfolio, operating model, and culture has been a key to our evolution.
For an organization to endeavor to change its culture, it needs to take its cue from what chanes in its strategy. Sometimes strategic shifts are driven by external events, such as the post 9/11 environment or the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. Other times, shifts may be driven by disruptions and disrupters like the one happending in the transportation and hotel markets right now thanks to the likes of Uber and Airnb. Of course, leaders, too, can set a different tone: Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, Lou Gerstner, and Steve Jobs all did that.
Whatever the prompt, a strategic shfit oftern cannot happen without a culture shsift as well.
The cultural shifts that GE has made over the last couple of decades were clearly set within the context of their respecitve eras in the business world. Let's take the 1990s. The context demanded operational excellence. Companies in industrial businesses had to drive costs down and execution up and create foolproof processes to ensure quality. Accordingly, Jack Welch's drive to Six Sigma involved an intense focus on controlling costs, quality, and execution on both the infrastructure and behavioral sides (e.g., the forced ranking of employees, and the "4Es" of energy, energize, edge, and execution that leaders were expected to demonstrate). The result was a tight, control-and-process-oriented, operationally focused, cost-conscious organization.
In the first part of the century, innovation became the priority. Operational excellence had made us vulnerable to disrupters that were figuring out new ways to move mainstream. New industries were spawned, some existing ones became obsolete, and others (e.g., telecom, music, and aviation) experienced upheavals. The decade also saw the rise of formidabe emerging-market competitiors and opportunities.
Accordingly, Wlech's successor, Jeff Immelt, drove GE to achieve rowth through innovation. In fact, we defined growth as a process. This was aided by encouraging innovation (through "imagination breakthroughs, "a way of protecting growth ideas) and launching a massive commercial training operation that bulit commercial and marketing capabilities. The behavioral dimensions of this effort were focused on alues like external focus, clear thinking, imagination, courage, inclusiveness, and expertise. The result was growth and scale. We grew our presence around the world and expanded our definition of emerging markets from China, India, and Brazil to include Algeria, ANgola, Chile, and Vietnam.
Now that the Great Recession is behind us, the business world is undergoing yet another shift. There are three drivers behind it.
An increasingly inter-connected world in which any one issue can trigger a "tsunami." The plunge in oil prices is an example. Not even the best pundits predicted that the fall would be so rapid and so dramatic. This is good news for some industries and ba for others. Or take Ebola. What's happening in West Africa is not confined to that part of the world alone.
The rise of th emillennial generation in the workplace. At GE, we specifically commissioned a group of millennials, called the GlobalNew Directions group, to help us understand what kind of an organizational culture they would like to see. They told us they were ready for a more horizontal, agile, "connect and inspire" model as compared to the "command and control" model the boomers are used to.
Employee engagement. Here, we use our employee surveys as a tool for culture change. Our employees clearly told us that our organization had to shift its culture - that we had to become more decentralized and simpler to do business with, and had to deleate power to where the action is.
GE has responded to this new context and feedback by making simplification our operating rhythum. The tenets of simplification include customer intensity, lean management, and a compete reimaginantion of IT - not as a cost ot be outsourced but as a strategic lever that must be maximized. Digital intensity is an imperative.
Using tools learned from Silicon Valley, GE launched FastWorks, which relies on lean start-up principles. The basis for lean start-up principles follow this simple framework. First, rather than engaging in months fo planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses - basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Second, use a "get out of the building" approach called customer development to test their hypothesis. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. Finally, practice something called agile development, which orginated in the ssoftware industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers' problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. This new way of working results in better outcomes for our customers, faster. FastWorks is about constantly experinmenting, learning, and iterating, and the customer being at the center of everything we do.
To facilitate this new operating model, we have had to create a new cultural template that demands new ways of behaving. We even called our new cultural orientation "the GE Beliefs" to enusre that people changed their frame of thinking to the ne way. The GE Beliefs are: Customers determine our success, stay lean to go fast, learn and adapt to win, empower and inspire each other, and deliver results in an uncertain world. They relfect a renewed emphasis on acceleration, agility, and customer focus. Interestingly, the GE Beliefs were crowdsourced from our employees for the first time - an attempt to drive a culture that the employees wanted to see.
In a fast-moving world, we have also realized that annual events are passe. Every operating rhythm has to become more agile, responsive, nimble, and focused. Consequently, we have moved away from an annualized stragic-palnning process to a more continuous process of checking on the environment and context and pivoting where necessary every quarter. Reviewing the people and organizational-capability equations is also more continous. And we are changing the way we do performance appraisals from an annual event to a more real-time approach. All these "interventions" reinforce the new culture - one of speed, simplicity and customer focus.
When culture is not given enough attention, it becomes an obstacle to change. Just as they do with strategy, companies should make constantly exmining their cultures a part of their operating rhythm.
PLEASE answer the following discussion questions in consecutive order for research paper purposes:
1. Change is inevitable in business, especially to sustain competitive advantage, and increase profit and growth. In Ulrich's competency, change champion, he identifies 6 competencies needed by HR professionals to extent to initate change. (a) ensure that key leaders are supportive of major change initiatives (b) help people understand why change is important - create a sense of urgency (c) identify and overcome sources of resistance to change (d) help set the direction of change with clear intended outcomes (e) build commitment from key people to support change efforts (f) articulate the key decisions and actions that must happen for change to progress - How are these competencies relevant to the GE case? Identify and discuss evidence of these competencies in the case.
2. Discuss the five competency factors of Ulrich's competency - HR Innovator and Integrator. (a) optimizing human capital through workforce planning and analytics (b) developing talent (c) shaping organization and communication practices (d) driving performance (e) building LEADERSHIP BRAND - leadership code, leadership differentiators. Discuss the relevancy of these facors evident in the case - implied or overtly. EXTRAPOLATE the opportunities there are for HR to innovative.
3. Discuss the difference between Ulrich's concepts: evolutionary change and revolutionary change in organizations in the context of the GE case. Are the elements of these change efforts apparent? What implications might be anticipated as a result of implementing these changes, given the facts of both the case?
4. Peter Block's approach to consulting in the "Diagnosis to Discovery" phase includes approaches to discovery, (research approach and action approach). FYI - these are more detailed in his book, "Flawless Consulting", chapter 10. Review each one and recommend which approach was utilized, providing evidence from the case. Why was this successful for GE?
Thanks for your support and response to these discussion questions.
Explanation / Answer
1. a.) Ensure that the key leaders are supportive of major change initiatives: When the business world was going through another shift in its culture, GE responded to this new context and feedback by simplifying their operating rythym.Using tools learned from Silicon Valley, GE launched FastWorks, which relies on lean start-up principles.
b.) Help people understand why change is important - create a sense of urgency: To facilitate FastWorks, new operating model, GE created a new cultural template that demanded new ways of behaving. They even called their new cultural orientation "the GE Beliefs" to ensure that people changed their frame of thinking to the new way.
c.) Identify and overcome sources of resistance to change: Take it from the line "When culture is not given enough attention, it becomes an obstacle to change.". GE knew this very well and constantly made cultural changes such as changing the way they used to do the performance appraisal etc thus overcoming the potential source of resistance.
d.) Help set the direction of change with clear intended outcomes: GE moved away from an annualized strategic-planning process to a more continuous process of checking on the environment and context and pivoting where necessary every quarter.Thus set the direction of change with brilliant outcomes such as speed, simplicity and customer focus.
e.) Build commitment from key people to support change efforts: One of the key people of GE were employees and GE crowdsourced major beliefs from its employees for the first time - in an attempt to drive a culture that the employees wanted to see.
f.) Articulate the key decisions and actions that must happen for change to progress : GE's key decisions such as to review the people and organizational-capability equations continously.Constant examination of their culture as a part of their operating rhythm.
3. Revolutionary change : In general terms revolutionary change is the one where a complete change of organisation takes place, a reconstruction is there. In context of this case, when GE launched FastWorks, it started to work on whole new principles which were not the same as earlier, which changed the way GE operated, thus changed its whole rythym. Which was clearly a Revolutionary change.
Evolutionary change: It is the change which takes place gradually, step by step, with small measures. Such as when GE changed the way it did performance appraisal to a more real-time process than an annual event, it was an evolutionary change.
And the elements of changes were very apparent. The implications to the evolutionary changes were speed, simplicity and customer focus and to the revolutionary change the implications were better customer response and agility.
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