The Geometry of Strategy by Keidel Robert W.;

Author:Keidel, Robert W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2010-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

This account is written from the collective standpoint of the principals of the firm, who have just completed a three-day retreat dedicated to creating a new strategy. The session was animated, with several divergent perspectives aired, especially in the early going. What follows is the summary process and tentative agreement reached by the end of the meeting – and now about to be communicated to others in the organization.

The Past (1976)

We decided to start at the beginning – to reconstruct where we came from. To a person, we saw ourselves as the non-T-group (training group). T-groups, which date to the 1940s and were popular well into the 1970s, were our counterpoint. They were offsite (conducted under “laboratory conditions”) explorations of small-group dynamics, in which participants might gain important new insights – but without any real connection to task or hierarchical structure; hence, it was not at all clear that these understandings would translate into change when individuals returned to their workplaces. To use the language of social scientist Eric Trist, T-groups were confined to that which was social; they never dealt with the technical. (Trist coined the expression sociotechnical system; he argued that in any organization, optimal performance depends on achieving the best match of its social and technical aspects.)

Nor did T-groups confront organizational politics, which we often did, especially when working with labor-management committees in unionized companies. Trist was our exemplar; he and some of his colleagues (including Gerry Susman at Penn State) modeled our direction. We engaged in what Edgar Schein (1969) called process consultation, with the aim of helping people to help themselves at work. We actually characterized ourselves as “quality of worklife consultants;” our precept was that involving employees in workplace decisions was both intrinsically the right thing to do, and instrumentally smart in terms of its productivity dividend. Our firm exemplified angular thinking.

Back then our only real measures of performance were how often the phone rang, and what our sales were. We never plotted it, but there probably was a direct relation between the number of calls we received from prospective clients and our overall billing level – with maybe a few months’ lag time.

The puzzle with which we continuously struggled was the balance of power, or discretion, between client managers and workers. How could workers assume a greater role in decision-making without reducing the status and contribution of managers? In our efforts to solve this conundrum, we discovered an anomaly: often, managers appeared to be more interested in retaining their own relative power than in improving organizational performance. We learned, however, that managerial reluctance to cede influence had a rational basis. Their own authority had a ceiling. These were lower-to middle-level managers, typically working for authoritarian, higher-level managers – many of whom were legacies in a family business. Those in the middle might share power with levels below, but higher-ups were not about to reciprocate with them.

Competitively, our triangular doughnut was defined by conceptualization (that is, coming up with new ideas – where our

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