RE: What is the purpose of a commercial firm?

["Vic Forte" <vic@vichara.f9.co.uk>]

> May I suggest that to satisfy all, we ignore variation and the
> aim becomes
> ideal rather than realistic.

In practice this seems to be what happens. I can remember in one of our
development sessions in the early days trying to work out who our firm's
customers are. We ended up with the realisation that our "customers" are our
stake holders. I think we ended up with a huge number.

We must consider the capability of our system to meet our policies. The
problem is not to drown our organisation and lose our focus on the customers
who buy our products and doing it profitably.

In practice we handle the variety (I think I mean variety here rather than
variation) through a de-centralised approach. We try and ensure that
somewhere within the organisation our important stake holders are being
considered.

One way of handling this variety is to build a culture of partnership, of
openness to the world and willingness to work together with anyone for
common benefit. This we have found is best done by first helping people
within the organisation to treat consider each others' requirements and
expectations, and to figure out how to meet commitments. The right culture
within the organisation is a good way of reducing the variety and complexity
of the decisions that management have to deal with.

We have done a lot of work on values. Trying to figure out what our values
are, and learning to live by them so that they become a way of life. With
the right values, as ends in themselves, the needs of stake holders are more
likely to be met.

The issue is how to make sure that those values are themselves truly owned
and believed, and not just another top-down exercise, which of course misses
the point. This is done by having the right process for producing your
values statement. The process should be one of consultation and reflection
rather than imposition, and should include all stakeholders. How you then
use the values is another issue.
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