On Wed, 21 Feb 1996, Michael McMaster wrote:
> Your "low skill equlibrium" theory points at the same situation.
> That is, without the investment in development of people, there is
> little choice but to focus on mass-production of low quality goods.
> (See Unipart and the Jaguar/GKN car body manufacturing for evidence.)
I think companies (forget the idea that a lot of companies don't have
shared vision to start with) are limited by the company-wide definitions
of their shared vision or mission statements. After companies have
defined what they want to deliver, how they want to deliver and who
they want to deliver to, the question still remains - what will their
product do for their customers?
Some companies know how to produce goods and market them in such a way
that their customers believe that they need the product to play a certain
role. [Ford paid a lot of money, over a billion dollars I think, to buy
Jaguar's "mystique". If I recall correctly, there were very few tangible
company assets.]
I think that some companies, even if they developed their employees,
would still focus on mass-production of low quality goods or, more
specifically, goods that are not perceived as doing more than taking up
space (is that really a suitable definition?) because they don't know how
to evolve as an organization (using the biological metapohor).
> Corporate control structures are lacking the world over when it comes
> to accounting. These systems are hopelessly stuck in the "old
> fashioned" view of a material universe where what counts is physical
> stuff rather than information and knowledge. (I can say this with
> some authority as my original degree and training is as a Chartered
> Accountant.) This interacts with my earlier comments about
> short-termism and lack of thinking, theory or strategy.
This was my conclusion too, as I wrote in an earlier message. I think
that the current rise of company "Intranets" may help change this
scenario. It really gives great opportunites for those people in the
organizations who are devoted to learning and synthesizing, to foster
company learning through "grass-roots" initiatives. Current "Intranet"
software will need to be adapted to maintain corporate control
structures over people, things and information.
Andrew Moreno
--Andrew Moreno <amoreno@broken.ranch.org>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>