Sb: Willingness to Change LO6015
Michael McMaster said, "We can't keep people informed. At best we can
make information available. The full information might exist in a
distributed way and even an integrated way - but never as a whole and
complete. A posted mission statement has not proved itself in any company
I've heard about nor been in. Occasionally, it might have helped."
I am reminded of examples that might clarify why information needs context
to become useful. It happens all the time -- I will cite one xample --
where demand for a particular product will far exceed available supply.
For whatever reason, a product becomes extraordinarily successful without
warning. I am thinking of an example that we have sold for at least 30
years, but which 2 years ago, suddenly sold at 3 time its normal rate.
Instead of selling 200,000 units we sold 600,000. This is very
frustrating for the people who answer the phone. All they knew was that
about 400,000 times they had to say, "sorry, that item will not be
available until ___." they could not, of course, understand why we didn't
just buy a lot more in anticipation of the demand.
The inventory buyer on the other hand thought it was a great success
because she had successfully filled 97% of the demand. She could not know
how popular the item would become. She did not have to answer the phone
400,000 times with a disappointing message. She felt she had dealt with
the challenge very successfully.
--Rol Fessenden LL Bean 76234.3636@compuserve.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>