As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the second installment in a series about improving corporate decision-making. Part 1.
Are numerous levels of middle managers and even front-line employees simply “implementing” reflexively, like an arm told by the brain to pick up a salt shaker? When a leader at corporate headquarters formulates a decision to “win on the basis of superior customer service,” do each of the division presidents open up the comprehensive “how to win on the basis of superior customer service” manual and simply, mindlessly start “implementing” steps one through 10,000 as a choiceless doer? No, if he was only good at reading manuals and mindlessly following instructions, he would never have made it to division president.
In fact, his job is to take the relatively abstract decision mandated by the corporate office and make a set of decisions within his division consistent with that corporate decision. Lo and behold, he, too, is a brain, not simply arms and legs.
And is his EVP of service operations just arms and legs, a choiceless doer? No, she is not. She needs to take the division president’s decisions and make choices on a consistent and reinforcing basis. So where are the arms and legs? Where are the employees that are mere choiceless doers?
Stay tuned for the conclusion of this article in next week’s post.
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
Where are the employees that are mere “choiceless doers”? They are running (ruining) airlines. (except Southwest of course)
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Here is the original Business Week article: Part 2.
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Very interesting. I had not read part 2 until now. I’m either psychic or a genius!! In reality, just a career airline employee who pays attention.
On a side note, 2 of the most innovative and interesting processes I had experienced in my aviation carrer were either born from or pushed by Canadians.
Self Directed Work Teams concept was brought to our airline by a Canadian (who happened to be an EVP). After it’s first year we saved our airline $140 Million!! Guess what happened? When he left the company, his predecessor let it die. My take was a precieved loss of “command and control” style of management. Which, by the way is rampant in the airline industry.
Amazing how some managers would rather have “control” over people and decisions than to be innovative and creative and allow free thinking from their employees.
The other innovative approach to avaition, in particular aviation safety, came from a fellow working for Transport Canada. That is Human Performance in Avaition Maintenance and Inspection, or Human Factors as we refer to it now. Although the idea of Human Factors was not new, what was new was how this gentleman approached it, packaged it, and brought the concept to US based airlines and convinced the regulatory agencies (FAA) that not only will this help the bottom line, it’s good for the safety of the industry.
Amazingly, just after 9/11, the airline I was working for decided that this newly created department, which was responsible for Human Factors, was not a necessary component to profitability. The entire project was canned. And this was an airline that had had 5 crashes in 5 years!!
Would it surprise you to know that this airline filed bankruptcy twice, and has now been bought out(merged)by another airline?
Whatever is happening north of the border of the US, keep sending those creative ideas down, maybe, eventually an intelligent CEO (probably Canadian)will take it and run.