The challenge you will read about is finding balance in your life. It is a logical extension from what we have been covering.
Leading change covers two VERY different companies and situations: Nissan and Home Depot. Compare these companies to Whole Foods and IDEO...
While there is no assigned reading, we have added the topic of gender differences in leadership. Hal has found the book, "Leadership and the Sexes" quite interesting, particularly as it begins from findings about brain differences between men and women and then goes on to articulate a strong case for "authentic, gender-balanced leadership."
Here is the link to an excerpt from Chapter #1:
http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008408.html
Feel free to post in advance of class, or after.
Hal
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9 comments:
hi, unfortunately I have been blogging in the 2007 version, I have most of my blog to the new folder, but feel a little stupid, since I have been posting all my ideas on a "dead" blog (-:
I have always been open to change I always believed that some times change is good. Currently I am being challenged with accepting the change that my company is going to implement. Gap Inc is going to implement a "Managed Services" model which means we are going to outsource all software engineering and testing jobs offshore. Top level managers and mid level managers will be retained to manage the work as Project managers a good part of the work force will be released in the coming weeks. I am having a hard time with leading this change due to the job eliminations. It is out of my control but I can't help feeling bitter about it.
A very interesting reading - Leadership and the Sexes.
Thx Hal for introducing the topic. Yes, gender differences in leadership can be accounted for through a variety of rationale. From interpersonal relationships to social role expectations to differences in perception and styles, men and women may indeed lead differently in addition to being ‘followed’ differently. The case of who serve as better leaders is a forever debate – the idea is in a given situation whose quality more suits the need and how it can be achieved.
I came across this lovely comparison -
http://www.fastennetwork.org/Uploads/C40146E8-91AF-4330-8812-97DD228C4FDF.pdf
And so the debate continues....
Ruchi Kohar
Hi mads
Is there a way you could filter the old 2007 blog to show just your postings?
If so, it may be easy for you to copy and paste the contributions you have made on this blog.
best regards
regu
NISSAN
In 1999, Nissan was suffering under a decade of decline and unprofitability; in fact the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Continuous loses for the past eight years had resulted in big debts. Internal factors that had led the company to the situation it was in was for example the emphasis on short-term market share growth instead of a long term success strategy, advanced engineering and technology, plant productivity and quality management. However, less attention was given to design and innovation, on the assumption that consumers were looking for quality and safety. This implied a lack of knowledge of the market, consumer's changing tastes, and showed that Nissan management did not pay too much attention to what competition was doing to the company.
Carlos Ghosn was the man who saved Nissan Motor. Ghosn played a central role in the company’s successful turnaround. Ghosn's radical resuscitation of Nissan had made him Japan's model for foreign business expertise. Ghosn, the irrepressible Brazilian-born managerwas able to wipe out Nissan's debt, reduce production costs, raise profitability and expand into China. Before Ghosn’s time at Nissan the company was lacking profit orientation, customer focus, cross-functional coordination and cooperation, a sense of urgency and a shared vision and strategy. One of the root causes of Nissan’s failure was according to Ghosn that the managers at Nissan usually did not have well-defined areas of responsibility.
One of Ghosn’s reforms in the company was that he put together cross-functional teams of juniors and seniors, putting marketing, sales, production and finance working together, creating a transparent decision-making process," Ghosn formed nine cross-functional teams in key areas. The team’s mission was to recommended fundamental changes in the Nissan organization and its human resources management. He did not recruit a new team instead he strongly motivated the Nissan people to do their absolute best. That's a terrific measurement of leadership.
Ghosn also thought that promotion and pay should be linked to performance instead of seniority as it had been before. Younger managers with outstanding track records would be promoted to key positions. It was very unusual in Japan.
Ghosn emphasized the importance of product development and sales growth. While cost cutting will be the most dramatic and visible part of the plan we cannot save our way to success. Ghosn was determined to reduce Nissan’s purchasing cost by 20 %. To achieve this Nissan cut the number of suppliers by 50% and concentrated its purchases on those that were competitive. Nissan changed its purchasing process entirely under Ghosn. All suppliers were rigorously evaluated. Purchase orders that had been placed with the keiretsu companies almost automatically in the past were put out to competitive bid. Several former keiretsu suppliers were not chosen under the new management.
Ghosn began to form what have become his three tenets of management. The first is what he calls "transparency" -- making sure people know that what you think, what you do, and what you say are the same. Ghosn’s messages are straightforward, direct and simple. He communicates his vision and priority he also goes directly to the people and addresses the entire company on a regular basis.
The second tenet is being able to measure everything you do, in terms of quality, costs, customer satisfaction. "I've seen wonderful plans that didn't go anywhere because people spent too much time on the concepts, rather than implementing the plan," Ghosn notes. "Execution is 95 percent of the job. Strategy is only five percent."
Ghosn's third managerial tenet is the importance of communication. He says one key to getting buy-in from Nissan's workforce, despite the need to reduce headcount, has been communicating the company's direction and its priorities in getting there. "It's amazing how companies forget these basic points," he notes.
Ghosn’s strategy at Nissan was to minimize the production costs, increase the profitability of the company and to bring back innovations to the company. Ghosn changed the structure of the company by introducing cross-functional teams and he did not have to bring in new employers instead he motivated the existing ones. Ghosn’s systems were to set well defined objectives such as improving the product development and the sales growth. The shared values was going to be efficiency and therefore the company’s old keiretsu suppliers had to give way to new more competitive suppliers. The style of Ghosn was straightforward and he was talking directly to the employees and that was a new thing within the Nissan company. The staffing and skills changed in that sense that Ghosn rewarded performance with promotion and pay and young managers were promoted to key positions. He also managed to motivate existing employers and he was able to wake up the sleeping skills that the employer’s possessed.
-Johanna Alm
Change management
It was some interesting reading this week about the change management.
First of all I would like to submit some material about change management. Remember this is models, and can be used as a “general framework” not as the model that can be used in all situation. However I find them useful as tools to how the Nissan case can be solved:
The first is very easy and I presented it shortly in class. It Lewins model:
Lewin (C&W)…1940s:
• Two sets of forces: those striving to maintain status-quo and those pushing for change
• Unfreeze: reducing those forces maintaining the organization’s behavior at its preset level
• Movement: shift the behavior, develop new behavior
• Refreeze: stabilizes the organizations new set of behavior…new stage of quasi-stationary equilibrium.
Unfreezing -> Movement-> Refreezing
The next one is the action plan research and is commonly used by many university research studies:
• Change as a cyclic process with
• Focus on joint activities between organizational members and OD consultants
• Heavy weight on data generating and diagnosis (causes for problem) before planning and action
– Interviews, process observation, questionnaires, and organizational performance data
Problem Identification-> Consultation with behavior science experts-> Data gathering and preliminary diagnosis-> Feedback to key client of group-> Joint diagnosis of problem-> Joint action planning -> action-> data gathering after action -> (loop)
The last one is kotters 8-step model that is very popular and common to use by today chage agents:
1. Establishing a sense of urgency
- Examining the market and competitive realities
- Identifying and discussing crises, potential crises,
or major opportunities
2. Creating the Guiding coalition
Putting together a group with enough power
to lead the change
Getting the group to work together like a team
3. Developing a vision and strategy
- Creating a vision to help direct the change effort
- Developing strategies for achieving that vision
4. Communicating the change vision
- Using every vehicle possible to constantly
communicate the new vision and strategies
- Having the guiding coalition role model the behavior
expected of employees
5. Empowering Broad-based Action
- Getting rid of obstacles
- Changing systems or structures that undermine the change vision
- encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and action
6. Generating short-term wins
- Planning for visible improvements in performance, or “wins”
- Creating those wins
- Visibly recognizing and rewarding people who made the wins posible
7. Consolidating Gains and producing more change
- Using increased credibility to change all systems, structure,
and policies that don’t fit together and don’t fit the transformation
vision
- Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and
- change agents
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture
- Creating better performance through customer- and productivity-
Oriented behavior, more and better leadership, and more effective
Management
Articulating the connections between new behaviors and organizational
Success
- Developing means to ensure leadership development and succession
When I read through the case I notice that the Nissan actually followed the 8-step model that I discribed above.
Carlos Ghosn is my new hero. I want to know more about him and his perspective on this incredible time of change. I did a little more research and saw that he is now the CEO of Renault and at one time Kerkorian was pursuing him to be the CEO of GM. I wonder if GM would still be looking for a bailout if he had taken the job. I would love to work for someone like him some day.
Regarding the gender differences excerpt... did anyone else take the BBC "What Sex is Your Brain?" test? (linked near the beginning of the article)
It was fun and interesting. And it makes me wonder where on the spectrum most successful leaders fall?
Plus the BBC site has a bunch of other interesting surveys to check out.
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