Okay -- so I have time play devil's advocate a little bit longer!
What if the scenario is something like this:
The Board of Directors, CEO, Senior management(which could be SVP's or
whatever -- the top crew making the big bucks) have two jobs: to keep the
stock market and shareholders happy and to provide a buffer between the
stockmarket, shareholders and the organization.
The purpose of the buffer is to make sure that the rest of the
organization does the work. Now this job can be achieved in a number of
ways -- through very direct use of power and intimidation on one end of
the scale or by allowing theories such as learning organizations to
proliferate at the other end. How well this works is dependent upon how
the organization is set up. For eaxmple, where access to resources is
well balanced between departments it tends to work better than if there is
a lot of comptetition. If there is a lot of competetition then the job of
the SVP's becomes 95% politics...
In the places where I am brought in by genuine learning organization types
of folks the saying is always true -- that Sr management doesn't walk the
talk. Why? Because that is not part of their job. Their job is to make
sure people below them do the work. (Never mind that this would work
better if they did walk the talk!) AND part of the work is to make sure
you are learning enough about the customer, the market etc -- to stay in
business. But you don't have to be a learning organization to achieve
that! I work in one company where intimidation rules and they are very
solid and very profitable.
This is all short term and it is money driven and I don't know how long it
can go on for. But I am seeing certain things very alive and well in a
lot of companies I go into. Just describing what I see and I think it is
realistic. And usually there are excited conversations about grass roots
movements to change the organizations which usually disapear once the
demands of day-in and day-out work take over.
Hey to put this in Marxist terms -- just for the fun of it --- this set-up
would be described as the exploitation of the workforce. As far as the
form the white collar revolution could take -- who knows? I didn't really
picture violent retaliation like a bombing on Wall Street...
Sherri
sherri@maloufinc.com Tel:603-672-0355
LMA, Inc Fax:603-673-7120
--Sherri Malouf <sherri@maloufinc.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>