This New Book Should Make You Smile

[Bob Mason <bob@cc-m.com>]

The book is entitled "The Knowing-Doing Gap," by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert
I. Sutton, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.  The review appeared in The
New York Times on June 25.  We will write our own review as soon as we get
the book.  

This note is to alert those of you who participated in the long DEN
discussion of why organizations are so resistant to transformation.  I hope
you will feel a sense of encouragement, as we did, after reading about this
study because it seems to provide confirmation of some of the things Deming
students believe.  We are curious to find out if the authors show any
awareness of Dr. Deming's philosophy or of any other theory of management to
guide the "doing" they advocate.

Dr. Deming must be smiling--at least a little--at the list of failure
symptoms the authors list:
o Failure to act on what is known (this is the "gap" between knowledge and
action)

    o "Far more talk than action about using enlightened management
techniques"

o Reliance on faulty yardsticks of performance (financial measures)

    o Discouragement of workers' attempts to cooperate

    o "A pervasive atmosphere of fear and distrust" holds in most companies
studied.

    o People fear to make mistakes.

The authors' chief recommendations:

    o Employee opinion is the single-most important indicator of progress.

o In the ideal organization no boss would be vindictive and the only failure
would be failure to act.

o People would feel free to take chances and make mistakes, even colossal
ones.

o Co-workers would cooperate to the utmost, with all their considerable
juices focused on the competition.

o Praise and promote people willing to deliver bad news to the boss.

o Learn from and even celebrate mistakes.

o Give people second (and third) chances.

o Root out intramural competition.

And finally, Dr. Deming is surely grinning:

o Eliminate employ recognition awards, as well as public rankings of top
performers, contests among departments or individuals, merit raises from a
small pool--anything in which the winners are few and everyone else is
pronounced a loser.

Bob Mason
-- 
Bob Mason at ManagementWisdom.com (CC-M, Inc.)
7755 16th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20012
202 882-7430  € Fax 202 882-7432 € Email: bob@cc-m.com
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