• The organization is guided by the vision of its reason for being. There is a clear purpose and people know what they will do, and will not do, "they walk their talk".
  
• The company operates in a focused, energized and predictable manner.
  
• Stretch goals are set, aligned and consistently achieved.
  
• There is an enterprise-wide focus on customers and earning their long-term satisfaction. There is a high degree of customer loyalty. At the same time, the organization knows when and how to say "no" to the market. It is disciplined enough to protect itself.
  
• Priorities are clear. The organization knows what to do, and what not to do. It enjoys a certain composure and peace of mind when making tough decisions.
  
• The entrepreneurial spirit is fully institutionalized. Evidence of organizational fertility abound. This creativity repeatedly produces controlled, profitable innovation.
  
• Organizational structures work well. Opposing forces are balanced. There is alignment between vision, strategy, structure, information, resource allocation and rewards. A company in Prime is continuously realigning these subsystems.
  
• The infrastructure provides reliable support.
  
• The governance process is institutionalized. People know and understand where and how decisions are made.
  
• Decision-making is done is an environment of healthy, constructive conflict. Points of view are considered, but there are no hard feelings if one's recommendations are not heeded. Differences of opinion rarely deteriorate into personality clashes or turf wars.
  
• There is intra- and inter-organizational integration and cohesion with clients, suppliers, investors, and the community. This internal cohesion enables the Prime organization to devote much of its energy externally.
  
• People enjoy working at the company. Few willingly leave and there is a backlog of people applying for positions at all levels.
  
• They embrace change. Prime companies work hard to adapt to changes in markets and technology so that they can gain share from weaker competitors.
  
• They enjoy consistent, above average growth in both sales and profits.
  

• Are cash rich and have very strong financial statements.
  
• Have reduced expectations for growth.
  
• Demonstrate little interest in conquering new markets, technologies, and frontiers.
  
• Focus on past achievements rather than future visions.
  
• Are suspicious of change.
  
• Reward those who do what they are told to do and punish those who do not.
  
• Are interested in reducing their risks.
  
• Invest much more on control systems, benefits, and facilities than they do on R & D.
  
• Form dominates function in the organizational climate. More emphasis is placed on how things are done, than what was done.
  
• Value uniformity, consistency and formality in dress, decorum, and behavior.
  
• Employ individuals who are concerned about the company's vitality, but are willing to abide by a "don't make waves" operating motto.
  
• Engender only negligible innovation with internal efforts.
  
• Acquire other products or companies for new products, markets, and entrepreneurship to feed into their distribution channels and operating systems.
  
• May be takeover targets themselves.
  

• People focus on who caused the problems, rather than on what to do about the problems.
  
• Problems get personalized. Rather than dealing with the organization's problems, people are involved in interpersonal conflicts, backstabbing, and discrediting each other.
  
• Paranoia freezes the organization.
  
• Personal survival and turf wars absorb all available energy leaving precious little to deal with the needs of customers or the world outside the organization.
  

• Has many systems and rules and runs on ritual, not reason.
  
• Has leaders who feel little sense of control.
  
• Is internally disassociated.
  
• Creates obstacles to reduce disruptions from its external environment.
  
• Forces its customers to develop elaborate approaches to bypass roadblocks.
  
  

Quote:https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

… "For decades the assumption has been that the work of managing is best performed by a superior caste of formally designated managers, but Morning Star’s long-running experiment suggests it is both possible and profitable to syndicate the task to just about everyone. When individuals have the right information, incentives, tools, and accountabilities, they can mostly manage themselves.”…

… "In most companies the hierarchy is neither natural nor dynamic. Leaders don’t emerge from below; they are appointed from above. Maddeningly, key jobs often go to the most politically astute rather than the most competent. Further, because power is vested in positions, it doesn’t automatically flow from those who are less capable to those who are more so. All too often managers lose their power only when they’re fired. Until then they can keep mucking things up. No one at Morning Star believes that everyone should have an equal vote on every decision, but neither does anyone believe that one person should have the last word simply because he or she is the boss. While management’s future has yet to be written, the folks at Morning Star have penned a provocative prologue. Questions remain. Can the company’s self-management model work in a company of 10,000 or 100,000 employees? Can it be exported to other cultures? Can it cope with a serious threat, such as a low-cost offshore competitor? These questions keep Rufer and his colleagues up at night. They readily admit that self-management is a work in progress. “Ideologically, we’re about 90% of the way there,” says Rufer. “Practically, maybe only 70%.”
I believe Morning Star’s model could work in companies of any size. Most big corporations are collections of teams, departments, and functions, not all of which are equally interdependent. However large the company, most units would have to contract with only a few others. With $700 million a year in revenues, Morning Star certainly isn’t a small business, but it’s not a humongous one, either. There’s no reason why its self-management model wouldn’t work in a much larger company”….

(05-21-2016, 08:27 AM)radind Wrote: The Adizes Corporate Lifecycle model looks good and provides a place to start discussion. One of my concerns is the large number of  government agencies in the bureaucratic stage. Until we find a way to overcome the bureaucratic tendencies, I would like to see old agencies abolished on some reasonable timeline( 25 to 30 years). New agencies could be started as needed to provide a totally fresh start(clean out the barnacles).
One example that comes to mind are the multiple national laboratories that were started in WWII era. They may each be doing wonderful work, but I think we could do with fewer of them  and don’t see the necessity for eternal life for such government agencies.

I did find a company with a different management structure. It will be interesting to see if this approach works long term and also see if this concept can be migrated to other organizations.

Quote:https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

(05-21-2016, 09:23 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-21-2016, 08:27 AM)radind Wrote: The Adizes Corporate Lifecycle model looks good and provides a place to start discussion. One of my concerns is the large number of  government agencies in the bureaucratic stage. Until we find a way to overcome the bureaucratic tendencies, I would like to see old agencies abolished on some reasonable timeline( 25 to 30 years). New agencies could be started as needed to provide a totally fresh start(clean out the barnacles).
One example that comes to mind are the multiple national laboratories that were started in WWII era. They may each be doing wonderful work, but I think we could do with fewer of them  and don’t see the necessity for eternal life for such government agencies.

I did find a company with a different management structure. It will be interesting to see if this approach works long term and also see if this concept can be migrated to other organizations.

Quote:https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

I am tempted to say that bureaucracy is the sophisticated and civilized way to do nasty and primitive things to people.

Few organizations, perhaps insurance companies excepted, begin with bureaucracies in place. Even banks started off in most cases as cottage industries in which the owner made most of the decisions. Bureaucracies are money-eaters, and they rarely produce much. It is hardly surprising that Adizes has bureaucracy as the final stage of life of many organizations. They are good at controlling things, but what they control is often suspect.

Not all government agencies are bureaucracies. School districts typically have a high ratio of teachers to administrators.

Quote:The General Electric story, of a long-proud initial member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling out of that index — and appearing to be in competitive free fall — provides a powerful illustration of two effects we see throughout today’s corporate world: clueless, but deep-pocketed, activist investors and mergers and acquisitions folks masquerading as strategists.

GE’s fall accelerated on October 25, 2015, with activist hedge fund Trian announcing a $2.5 billion equity investment in GE stock, one that made it a top 10 shareholder. GE stock was trading at $25.47 at the time of announcement, with a dividend of $0.92 per share. Trian announced that with its help, GE could look forward to a stock price in the $40–$50 range by 2017, and threatened a proxy battle unless GE put Trian cofounder Ed Garten on the board. In June 2017 longtime CEO Jeff Immelt resigned under unrelenting Trian and shareholder pressure, and John Flannery took over as CEO. Four months later Garten joined the board.

During the Immelt era, the dominant mode had been of strategy by way of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures (MA&D), including most recently the disastrous merger of the GE oil and gas business with Baker Hughes in 2016. In the fall of 2017 under Flannery, MA&D unsurprisingly became GE’s turnaround strategy tool. Along with a surprise halving of the dividend, Flannery announced a review of the portfolio that would see the divestitures of numerous historic GE businesses, which ended up including light bulbs, appliances, and locomotive engines.

The approach of seeing strategy as the act of rejuggling one’s corporate portfolio of businesses is common in the large modern corporation. Many have strategy heads, who are ex-dealmakers at investment banks, whose default assumption is that if the company has a performance problem, the natural fix is to buy and/or sell something. The idea does not naturally come to mind that perhaps the problem is an uncompetitive value equation with customers. The result is a boon for the private equity business, which gets to buy underperforming corporate divisions for a song and turn them around at a huge profit, and for the sellers of growth businesses, who get paid crazy multiples of earnings and sales for businesses that are purchased to generate growth for big companies that are, on their own, incapable of organic growth.

It is not as though MA&D can’t help strategy. It can when the moves are designed to help improve the value equation delivered for the customer — like Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram, or P&G buying Tambrands. But for a business that is struggling with growth and/or profitability, MA&D is not going to be of assistance if it distracts management’s time from fixing the core customer value equation problem — and it almost inevitably distracts. That is one reason why so many acquisitions are abysmal failures: They are distracting Hail Mary attempts. Take, for example, News Corporation getting into the exciting internet space by buying MySpace, or Microsoft into smartphones with Nokia, or HP into software and services with Autonomy — all written off virtually in their entirety.

(07-03-2018, 10:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... I think that we can see a once-venerable company headed into a death spiral. It makes bad, desperate decisions that work out badly.  Some of these mergers suggest an aging tiger eating a healthy young lamb and expecting rejuvenation from the meal. The tiger is getting nothing more than a meal; it won;t gain any vitality. The lamb of course is no more. 

(05-21-2016, 08:27 AM)radind Wrote: The Adizes Corporate Lifecycle model looks good and provides a place to start discussion. One of my concerns is the large number of  government agencies in the bureaucratic stage. Until we find a way to overcome the bureaucratic tendencies, I would like to see old agencies abolished on some reasonable timeline( 25 to 30 years). New agencies could be started as needed to provide a totally fresh start(clean out the barnacles).
One example that comes to mind are the multiple national laboratories that were started in WWII era. They may each be doing wonderful work, but I think we could do with fewer of them  and don’t see the necessity for eternal life for such government agencies.

I did find a company with a different management structure. It will be interesting to see if this approach works long term and also see if this concept can be migrated to other organizations.

Quote:https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

… "For decades the assumption has been that the work of managing is best performed by a superior caste of formally designated managers, but Morning Star’s long-running experiment suggests it is both possible and profitable to syndicate the task to just about everyone. When individuals have the right information, incentives, tools, and accountabilities, they can mostly manage themselves.”…

… "In most companies the hierarchy is neither natural nor dynamic. Leaders don’t emerge from below; they are appointed from above. Maddeningly, key jobs often go to the most politically astute rather than the most competent. Further, because power is vested in positions, it doesn’t automatically flow from those who are less capable to those who are more so. All too often managers lose their power only when they’re fired. Until then they can keep mucking things up. No one at Morning Star believes that everyone should have an equal vote on every decision, but neither does anyone believe that one person should have the last word simply because he or she is the boss. While management’s future has yet to be written, the folks at Morning Star have penned a provocative prologue. Questions remain. Can the company’s self-management model work in a company of 10,000 or 100,000 employees? Can it be exported to other cultures? Can it cope with a serious threat, such as a low-cost offshore competitor? These questions keep Rufer and his colleagues up at night. They readily admit that self-management is a work in progress. “Ideologically, we’re about 90% of the way there,” says Rufer. “Practically, maybe only 70%.”

I believe Morning Star’s model could work in companies of any size. Most big corporations are collections of teams, departments, and functions, not all of which are equally interdependent. However large the company, most units would have to contract with only a few others. With $700 million a year in revenues, Morning Star certainly isn’t a small business, but it’s not a humongous one, either. There’s no reason why its self-management model wouldn’t work in a much larger company”….

(10-11-2018, 11:59 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-03-2018, 10:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... I think that we can see a once-venerable company headed into a death spiral. It makes bad, desperate decisions that work out badly.  Some of these mergers suggest an aging tiger eating a healthy young lamb and expecting rejuvenation from the meal. The tiger is getting nothing more than a meal; it won't gain any vitality. The lamb of course is no more. 

The era of shareholder value being the sole driving force in business has been an unmitigated disaster.  Until it's resolved, more of this will go on until we cannibalize our entire economy to benefit the very, very few.  It's 40 years and counting already.  Even allowing for the massive wealth and power of our corporate community, it can't continue forever.