Enterprise Management

During the past two decades, American corporations have invested heavily in a variety of "new" management concepts in their search for enhanced competitiveness. But concepts such as total quality management, reengineering, and benchmarking have produced only scattered pockets of success. For the most part, American corporations have struggled in using them to effect rapid, far-reaching change.

To achieve full competitiveness, total quality, reengineering, employee involvement, and related tools of change should be integrated under a unified approach to management. Even the best tools will not have the desired impact unless they are managed as part of an enterprise-wide plan targeted at the key strategic and cultural issues facing the business. Like the many components of a well designed building, they must work in concert as part of a unified system.

Hundreds of leading corporations have trained thousands of managers and employees in these tools without achieving the full results promoted when they were originally adopted. This is because such initiatives are rarely viewed as linked concepts; they are instead managed as disjointed efforts sponsored by different managers in different departments. To achieve lasting and rapid change, these tools must be understood for what they are, and integrated into a single management process—supporting a well understood plan to implement the business' strategy and change its culture.

The first job of senior management is to create and implement such an initiative, and understand that the strategic direction of the business and the processes which manage these "tools" need to be one and the same thing; leadership skills create the environment in which this can happen.

When the tools of change management are not viewed in the minds of managers as reinforcing concepts, the result is a "disconnected" organization. The symptoms of such an organization include:

	Lack of full understanding of where the business truly is, strategically and culturally
	Confusing and conflicting direction (in spite of a stated mission and strategic plan)
	Traditional, vertical "silos" (in spite of "teamwork" initiatives)
	Vigorous politics and turf protection (in spite of the surface appearance that everyone is "on the same page")
	Conflicting management processes, including separate processes for strategic planning, total quality, and employee involvement
	Departmental quality improvement teams, working on initiatives that are not fully connected to the key strategic issues of the business
	Employee perception that top management is hypocritical and not on the same page
	Slow and spotty progress on real change
	Management not in control of the change process

By contrast, within the connected or "enterprise" company, there is a unity of culture, language, management plans, and employee actions. Characteristics of the "enterprise" company include:

	A clear and realistic understanding of where the company is—as well as candor about its strategic and cultural issues and opportunities
	A senior staff unified and committed to an integrated approach and functioning as an enterprise-wide team
	All improvement initiatives linked to key strategic issues and opportunities
	TQM, reengineering, and benchmarking viewed and managed as valuable, integrated tools within an overall management process
	Change that happens more rapidly, and is farther-reaching
	Senior management in control of the change process

How does a company that shows signs of being "disconnected" learn to operate as a highly focused enterprise? Companies with these symptoms can make significant strides forward by using a pragmatic change management process that targets the culture of the business and the mindset of management by focusing teams on the top-priority strategic and work process issues facing the business.

To begin this process, companies need to undergo an intense period of candid self-assessment. This period can be relatively brief, between eight and 12 weeks. During this period, the company establishes parallel transition teams, consisting of top-level managers and professionals who learn to function as enterprise teams by tackling top-priority issues while maintaining "vertical" responsibilities and titles.

As a first step, top levels of managers and professionals are brought together in a three-day workshop. This becomes a "breakthrough" session as the key people in the business (45-60), working in four to six teams, deal with top-priority issues and opportunities, as well as the key obstacles to team success.

These crossfunctional "advocate teams" address each issue and opportunity—such as developing new marketing strategies, enhancing sales effectiveness, compressing cycle times for key work processes, or reconfiguring manufacturing work flow to reflect new market realities—all from a "total business" general manager's perspective. These advocate teams establish specific performance goals and action plans to accomplish them, while the senior team focuses on "vision development." While its work is mostly "top-down," it is a peer team, subject to the same progress review standards as the other advocate teams that are mostly "bottom-up."

This process ensures a solid and clear connection between the organization's strategic and quality improvement processes, because the "doers" and the "visionaries" serve together in a truly team-based, empowered environment, acting as the primary change agents. This approach allows middle managers and professionals to contribute as fellow leaders and entrepreneurs, rather than mere functionaries.

The key to its success is full candor about the top-priority issues from day one. Even when these issues are traced to senior management's doorstep, they are treated with the same respect for candor as are all other issues.

Progress on these top-priority, usually provocative, issues causes barriers between functions and management levels to crumble. The organization learns to deal more effectively with its cultural dimension—which is the predominant influence on an organization's effectiveness, and is also the most difficult issue to confront. Turf protection, personality conflicts, leadership styles, and other "cultural truths" require thorough homework, candor at all levels, and a leader with the courage to deal with these sensitive issues.

By integrating the vertical, horizontal, and cultural dimensions of the organization, this approach leads to more rapid and farther-reaching results than most approaches to change management—literally a transformation. With a "good for the company" mindset and an open culture, an organization can learn to routinely identify and overcome its obstacles to competitiveness. It learns that "harsh facts are friendly," a key to a top team that is connected to the realities of the business and a truly empowered group of employees turned on to leveraging the strategic opportunities facing the business. Top-down strategic plans become linked with bottom-up quality initiatives, and are managed within the improved capabilities of the organization's culture.

While many businesses believe that it takes three to five years to transform the culture of an organization, our experience with large companies has shown that Enterprise Management can dramatically reduce the cycle time for deep-seated organizational change—to one or two years—if senior management is courageous and committed.