Strategic Management

© 2012 Wilson I.B.Essien, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/15/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-7285-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-7284-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-7283-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011961389

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Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4:

CHAPTER 5:

CHAPTER 6:

CHAPTER 7:

CHAPTER 8:

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10:

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12:

CHAPTER 13:

CHAPTER 14:

CHAPTER 15:

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wilson Essien is the CEO of Sunrise Vending Company in San Francisco, California. He received his BS degree in business management in 1986 from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California. In 1994, Mr. Essien received his MBA from National University in San Diego, California, and then in 2001, he received his PhD in organizational development (integral studies) from the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California.

Dr. Essien’s research and publications focus on innovations in dialogue, the bottom line, and the aftermath bottom line, motivation, business and ethics, business and culture, and team-based organizations, including imaginative and creative thinking and writing.

Dr. Essien has served as adjunct professor at the University of Phoenix, as a broker for Metro Loans Company, as president of Wilson Maintenance Company, and as a district court registrar.

Dr. Essien is the author of Managerial Handbook (2006) and The Effa Woodpecker Story (2009). He has also earned a Profile of Academic Excellence from his alma mater.

PREFACE

This book is designed to serve students, managers, and business owners. In it I discuss the bottom line regarding what we need to do to come up with profits. A student should study hard and research where it needs to be done; the result of the student’s hard work is good grades or passing a course convincingly. This is what I call the aftermath bottom line. The aftermath bottom line is always the result; it could be either positive or negative, but hard work for a student is his or her bottom line, and the same is true for a businessperson.

The idea of a bottom line and an aftermath bottom line occurred to me when I was researching materials for my dissertation. My interviews with managers and business owners helped me understand how businesses are now managed, despite all the better business schools we now have. They have repeated the idea that the bottom line means profits so many times that I thought there was a disconnect or a gap between what we need to do to earn profits and the idea of making profits from the get go of the company. I thought there should be some kind of psychological interruption between hard work and profit making, almost like the chicken and the egg. This makes a great difference in business management, but to my dismay, I discovered that although most of the managers and business owners I interviewed made feasibility studies, no sooner did the business begin operating than they forgot all about the studies, which clearly stated how hard they should work to generate so much profit in a year.

After the business started, the hard work part quickly evaporated, and now management started to concentrate on going from profitability to hard work instead of from hard work to profitability. This twisted management has caused a lot of damage in every society. People no longer think about how they can serve the society but how the society can serve them. It is all about money. I imagined what Mr. Bell was thinking when he was working hard to provide the world with the telephone; was he motivated by profit making or service to the world? How about the Wright Brothers—were they thinking about profit when they were working hard to produce an airplane for the world?

I think that if we simply let money work as the medium of exchange and work on our dreams, we get more than we bargain for. Today, most of our technologies are what I call innovative technology. We need to get back to inventive technologies, but money and the dream of being a billionaire is the obstacle to developing deep thinking and innovative technologies. Please try to orient your mind to the bottom line, which means doing the hard work and then the aftermath bottom line, and the almighty profits will follow.

This book also includes, among other topics, discussions of ethics in business, culture and personality, teamwork, dialogue, leadership, diversity and culture, management by ideology (MBI), strategic management, global marketing strategies, economies of retrenchment, and the global economic downturn. I think that every reader will get exactly what they are looking for.

This book is great for academics, mostly for class discussion in advanced business programs, and for managers and business owners. You have to remember that cutting corners to make short-term profitability may not balance with the long-term effectiveness of whatever business you are managing.

When I talk about hard work, I definitely mean three things:

1. Brainwork—this could be research and development (R&D), eyewitness accounts, and other sources of information.

2. Physical work—this could mean being able to do things with strength where it needs to be applied.

3. Endurance—this is brainwork and physical work that could be exhausting, but the glue between brainwork and physical work is endurance. In a PhD program, everything is challenging, but if you can endure, you are bound to make your dream come true.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of more than five years of empirical research findings, literature review, eyewitness accounts, and development. I would like to thank all those individuals who made the entire research and development process interesting and possible for me. I want to thank my friend Dr. Asuguo Onda for telling me that my book The Effa Woodpecker Story is one of his favorite books. That was a great encouragement for me, especially coming from someone for whom I have great respect, academically and otherwise.

I thank all those who bought the first Managerial Handbook and The Effa Woodpecker Story. It is this encouragement that keeps me writing, researching, and analyzing my eyewitness accounts in order to keep up this high standard.

I sincerely thank my children, who are themselves holders of degrees, for understanding and knowing that I cannot be with them as much as they need me because as a scholar I have to work on the research and development of new ideas for younger generations.

I thank Almighty God for giving me good health and an insatiable urge to doing things for the benefit of others.

CHAPTER 1

DEFINITIONS

Teamwork is not just a group of people working together; it is a concept and requires work by the individuals involved. Behavioral science research has revealed that teams make superior decisions when issues are difficult (Bradford & Cohen, 1997, p. 5). Therefore, teams make superior decisions or are superior in decision-making processes.

Adequate case diagnosis is the basis for developing an action plan that eventually makes recommendations for implementation. We have to understand the differences between teams and teamwork and task forces. Let’s examine each of these elements.

Teams

People want to achieve and accomplish challenging work for the internal satisfaction of doing a job well. Relations on the job need to be structured so that individuals share information and resources and encourage each other to work effectively. As a practical matter, individuals find it very difficult to be productive without the advice, knowledge, and support of others (Tjosvold et al., 1995). For the above reasons, people organize into teams just to ensure peace, stability, and a sense of belonging in the same organization, but this has nothing to do with following rules or solving specific problems. Most importantly, no team member is accountable for any breakdown in information sharing.

Teamwork

Teamwork basically indicates a group of people working together for efficient productivity in their desired work. The members may have distinct identities and work together in a coordinated and mutually supportive way, open and expressive, with any disagreements being resolved promptly. The members are goal- oriented, understanding, and accepting; they listen, share information, and ultimately have great decision-making skills. For example, members of Boeing’s Project Homework had to collect and analyze complex information and debate and integrate views to hammer out their recommendations (Tjosvold et al., 1995).

Teamwork is a means of generating new ideas or creative solutions when information is highly dispersed initially among several individuals and/or when some mutual stimulation is needed among members to be fully creative. It can serve critical liaison or coordination functions among several departments in organizations whose work is, to some degree, interdependent. In meetings, members also dialogue instead of communicating. In dialogue, thoughts are often suspended, meaning that no one is expected to have a preconceived idea of what should be right or wrong about issues to be discussed. Team members have to understand the connections between or among the parts that are connected to make a decision workable. Every assumption is carefully examined and every question answered, while the pros and cons of other suggestions are examined before a decision on the facts is made. More often than not, the winning decisions are often the best decisions to be implemented. The company can still fail if the implementation is carried out badly or ignored.

A case in point is the following: A company that was one of the best in its industry began losing market share suddenly. Sales were down 10 percent; revenue was down 15 percent. The company started experiencing confusion because employees were not sure anymore if they would maintain their jobs. But the company practiced teamwork. The organization was semi-medium in size and had about fifteen members in each of four departments. The team leaders wrote information for their members detailing precisely what was going on in the company with no one knowing why it was happening or how to solve the problems. Each leader scheduled a meeting where they could have dialogue on the issues. With the members having received the advance notice, they then had ideas on what the meeting would be about, and they began brainstorming in their spare time. On meeting day, each member arrived fifteen minutes before the scheduled time. They greeted each other and made jokes quite different from the issues that they were going to discuss.

FIGURE 1

Members B and O are the only members on the sales team.

The team leader serves as a monitor, and the secretary writes down everything each member says without modifications. The members simply examine what other members say, and questions are clearly answered. For example, Member B said, My fellow members, you know that I work in sales and on the whole team there are just two sales members. I believe that our team needs to be increased to at least four salespersons. He also mentioned quality and told the members that the European Union and the Chinese were stepping up quality. Finally, yet importantly, he stated that the competition is clearly the order of the day. Member O told his teammates that he had experienced the same thing and that he would like at least one woman on each sales team. He closed by telling the members that he had relayed his information to the chief engineer, who looked at him as if he didn’t know what Member O was talking about.

As one may envision, many questions were directed to the two salesmen, and they clearly responded to all of them with no fear of reprisal. Of course, the salesmen knew that if they gave the wrong information to the team, the team might come up with the wrong recommendations. Team members make recommendations; they don’t make decisions. To give credit where credit is due, I must mention that in most cases team recommendations become the final decisions.

However, as a matter of procedure, the four team leaders must meet to compare notes, and that is where the leaders share their own expertise and work hard to achieve what I call elimination by substitution. They then will come up with a final recommendation. They simply select recommendations from those already made by the teams. They take into consideration the feasibility and affordability of each recommendation, but team leaders have to be very careful in how team recommendations are handled, because there are easy avenues where leaders are let go. Sometimes they try to save money by eliminating important recommendations; of course, that would not sit well with senior managers and the chief executive officer (CEO). But team leaders are always careful for fear of losing their jobs.

We need to understand that if the conditions in a company deteriorate fast and go out of control, the senior officers and the CEO could be dismissed. This brings to mind a system of checks and balances to curtail abuses by anyone where no one wins.

Teams can exist hand in hand with the hierarchical system where the chief executive officer is at the top followed by the senior officers and then by other leaders and the workers.

The difference between a hierarchical company and a team-based company is that in a hierarchical company decision making is top down, meaning that the CEO and his senior officers know better. They make the decisions for others and the supervisors, who do their jobs daily know that the CEO’s decisions have nothing to do with what goes on in the plant and no bearing at all on what goes on in sales. In team-based companies, decisions are made bottom up, as I call it. That means that workers who do the job daily and salespeople who are in the forefront of the plant’s business and dealing with costumers brainstorm, dialogue, and come up with decisions or idea regarding what the company needs to move on in order to compete in a global economy. A non-team-based company is like an onlooker telling a man wearing shoes where the shoe is causing him pain, while on a closer view the onlooker based his analysis on the wrong foot.

One of the most ridiculous types of management is the use of consultants. These people must act like soothsayers, because they have no idea about what is going on in the company. They have to be told what the company has perceived as the problem; then the consultant has room to start his or her guesswork. Sometimes a company simply stumbles into solutions while the consultant takes the credit.

Even if your company sees another that produces the same product that it does and perhaps is doing well financially, please do not invite them in as consultants for your company. It will be wasting your money, because you do not have the same problems. Your employees are better consultants than anyone else, because they do the job daily and therefore can come up with better recommendations for effective solutions. Sometimes problems from different institutions may look alike, and when viewing them at a glance, one may think that all the problems can be solved in a similar fashion. Unfortunately, there are unique aspects to every problem, and unless that aspect is uncovered, solutions will be hard to come by.

In a team-based organization, analysis might be tedious, but the unique aspect of the problem is easily made manifest because many employees have had experience with what has surfaced as a major problem in the company. Whatever the team has discovered as a major problem is what I call an eyewitness problem. It is difficult for an eyewitness problem to be discovered by a consultant.

Many authors have written and lectured about high-performance teams. Having owned and managed a mortgage loan company, I think that high performance in an organization depends on the strict implementation of the team’s recommendations and a clear adherence to the discipline it requires for adequate performances. There are constraints in any hierarchical team base; looking on recent charts, one sees the CEO, senior managers, and team leaders. If the line of management is too long, there is every possibility that before the recommendations get to the CEO’s desk much of the original language may have been changed, along with the original meaning and intent. The chart will also tell you that senior managers have little or nothing to do with effective management.

On the other hand, if the team leaders are allowed to go straight to the CEO with the recommendations, very few things may have changed. It must be stated that a manager or a business leader must understand that management is an artistic work. Take a clear look at your organization; if it requires long lines of management personnel, of course, go for it. It all depends on how you have defined what you are looking for in the business organization.

For instance, if it is a family business, you may prefer making moderate profits at the expense of boosting the egos of family members by assigning respected titles to them. Sometimes these titles may have nothing to do with how much a family member is actually paid. A family member who is a senior executive may like to be paid half of what he or she could have been paid outside of the business to enable the family to have enough money for research and development.

Setting

In teamwork, setting is very necessary.

1. It has to be round table.

2. A team must not be more than ten to fifteen members.

3. There must be a secretary who writes down all that is said.

4. The team leader must be the moderator.

5. Disagreements must be treated maturely; that is, these should be done in the form of questioning to clarify issues rather than shouting and talking in a disorderly manner.

6. The members must understand that they are in the meeting in order to come up with constructive recommendations in a decision-making process that could affect their job security and the longevity of the entire company. Of course, they do not have to be experts; they simply have to be aware of what it is that they are talking about and come up with an honest analysis based on this understanding. The moderator must always be aware of where the members get off course or make errors. The moderator should never think that the members know everything. From time to time, the moderator should go over the issues during the meeting.

Recommendations

The moderator needs to remind the team members that they do not make decisions but make recommendations for the CEO and the senior executives for decision making. Their recommendations should be based primarily on the short-term goals that may lead to the long-term ones, but they need to remember that short-term profitability must balance with the company’s long-term effectiveness.

Team members have to understand that teamwork, like management itself, is an artistic work, so their recommendations need to be flexible to give room for modifications where possible. This means that the use of words like should and shall may be avoided, while using words such as could and may can be encouraged in the process of writing the recommendations.

The team leader should by no means interfere with the team’s recommendations by either influencing them or asking them to write the recommendations in his or her own way. When such interference occurs, the team should report to a senior officer who can investigate the issue and, if the interference is found to be true, may simply replace the team leader.

In a very large company where the number of employees may be two thousand or more, teams might be made up on a departmental basis, and each department can have as many teams as possible. But the rule of thumb for the makeup of the individual team is that there should be no more than ten to fifteen members for real effectiveness. For effectiveness, top teams could repeat their deliberations on really important matters such as a company losing money and/or market share. The second time around, the process should take a different form, and the background of the issues should be properly laid out by the team leader, who is also the moderator. Any member who raises a hand should be allowed to talk, but only one at a time; questions are asked and adequate answers given by one or more team members. The teamwork process should not be a hasty one. The team should delve deeply into the situation and do their work carefully. A team’s fact-finding recommendation could take days or even weeks.

The second recommendation made should be compared to the first one; if there are wide differences, the first recommendation may be discarded while the second one is upheld as having been properly understood, discussed, and dialogued. Team leaders from all the departments should get together and compare notes on their recommendations, and interesting differences should be noted and discussed. It does not matter if all of the team leaders agree on all the recommendations, but areas of the leaders’ disagreements should be submitted to the CEO sitting with his senior executive. It should be noted that the background of the case is the same for all departments, and the case for the recommendations is the same.

Mistakes Companies Make

Many companies think that team members should be experienced in different fields with advanced degrees. Having an advanced degree is not necessarily a disadvantage but is not necessary; what is required is the experience on the job that the team that has been assigned to make recommendations brings to the table. This requires knowing the issues and the case and then being able to dialogue freely on those issues.

In the majority of cases, advanced degree holders may simply produce purely academic recommendations that have little or nothing to do with practical solutions required to get the company moving. This is not said to devalue academics. Believe me, college degrees are very important in everything, including analytical maturity. I am not denigrating academic degrees, but I am saying that these degrees are not the prerequisite to being a good team member.

For instance, when my school did a consulting job for the Crook Motor Company, the leader was also a college professor, but the team was more or less a task force. In this case, dialogue, which is the centerpiece of teamwork, was entirely absent. Most of the talking was done by the leader, who acted as a moderator. From time to time, a member made a point. Of course, the primary issue was that the company was losing money and did not know where the problem was. However, this was a period when corruption was rampant, and I felt that the name of the company, Crook, was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I told the organization that I felt the name of the organization should be changed to exclude the name Crook. The leader was surprised and asked himself why he was unable to think the way I did.

All I am saying is that the leader thought he knew everything about the case, and understandably, as he was the most educated person on the team, even though I had my MBA and was finishing up my coursework on my doctoral program. The leader already had his PhD with long-standing experience. Again, even though the leader dominated the task force, many others contributed excellently. If it were a typical task force, most of the members could have been professionals.

Task Force

Toward the end of the last paragraph, I talked about task force. A task force is like any team but without the strict guidelines of teamwork. When tasks are complex, specialized and changing, it is almost impossible for a leader to know all the relevant information. Task forces are more flexible than larger organizational groupings because they can be assembled more quickly, deployed, refocused, and disbanded without disrupting permanent structures.

Comparison Between Task Force and Teamwork

Similarities

There are also some similarities between a task force and teamwork, including the making of recommendations as well as not making decisions.

• They are both supportive of their members, although member support is more prevalent in teamwork.

• They both have one leader at a time but are very independent during meetings.

• Sometimes consensus may occur during deliberations in both styles simply to enable the organization to function for the moment, though the underlying problem may still persist.

• Both styles have to understand the background of the issues, ask question, and make individual contributions.

In my theoretical research for this book, I found that authors have said little or nothing about task forces; many of them simply lumped task forces and teamwork under the same definition. I believe this is a mistake, because in a task force, members use communications during meetings, while in teamwork, setting dialogue is the centerpiece of deliberations during meetings.

Characteristics of Pure Dialogue and Communication

Dialogue

Dialogue is concerned with providing a space within which such attention can be given.

It allows a display of thought and meaning that makes possible a kind of collective preconceptions, prejudices, and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to share these insights. (Bohm, Factor, & Garrett, 1991, p. 3)

Dialogue sees all the issues from the components or the contributing parts of the issues and thus is aware of the connections, assumptions, and disclosures through a learning inquiry that creates a shared meaning among many.

The Power of Dialogue

Often, complex issues require intelligence beyond that of any individual; yet in the face of complex, highly conflicting issues, teams typically break down, revert to rigid positions, and cover up deeper-held views. The result is watered-down compromises and a tenuous commitment on the part of everyone. Dialogue, however, is a discipline of collective learning and inquiry. It can serve as a cornerstone for organizational learning by providing an environment in which people can reflect together and transform the ground from which their thinking and acting emerge. Dialogue is not merely a strategy for helping people talk with each other. In fact, dialogue often leads to new levels of coordinated action without the artificial, and often tedious, process of creating action plans and using consensus-based decision making. Dialogue does not require agreement; instead, it encourages people to participate in a pool of shared meaning, which leads to aligned action (Isaacs, 1993).

Dialogue in the Workplace

The way people talk together in organizations is rapidly becoming acknowledged as central to the creation and management of knowledge. According to Alan Webber, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, conversation is the means by which people share and often create what they know. Therefore, the most important work in the new economy is creating conversations (Webber, 1993, p. 25).

I want to make it clear to students, managers, and readers that dialogue is at the center of the study of teamwork in business or any organization. More about dialogue will be discussed as we continue; for now, let us turn to communication.

Communication

Communication involves telephone conversations, face-to-face meetings, e-mails, letters, and many other means of interchange between individuals, but it is not a process that is meant to work like teamwork. In this case, one has to be right while the other has to be wrong, much like a debate and discussion. For instance, if you call a talk show host on any radio station and ask a question or make a statement that brings up a lot of argument, the host might tell the caller, I want to have a discussion with you. In the host’s point of view, he or she wants to prove that you, the caller, are wrong or mistaken. Of course, that is the essence of discussion, and that is what communication is, which is why I do not want any of my clients to adopt the communication process in his or her business or organization—the process creates more problems than it solves.

In communication, people are concerned with creating distinctions, justifying themselves, defending assumptions, and persuading, selling, telling, and/or gaining agreement. It is a mistake to try to justify communication as a means of deliberation during team meetings.

Communication is vital for the most pressing task of all: preparing organizations to adapt to change and learn more effective ways of working. Levi Strauss CEO Robert D. Haas advised managers to do as much listening as talking because a commitment to two-way communication is needed to create the common vision, sense of direction, and understanding of values, ethics, and standards necessary to empower employees (Tjosvold et al., 1995).

Mr. Haas’s advice is good but has nothing to do with teamwork, because the setting is wrong; the managers simply listen while the employees talk but make no written recommendations to the higher authorities for decision making. In other words, Levi Strauss has nothing to do with the decision-making process; they are simply at the mercy of unscrupulous managers who may regard the informal contributions of the employees as personal property to be presented before the final decision makers for personal credit. They then yet again disregard the employees as uneducated and incapable of making contributions for the progress of the company. Mr. Haas could have known that employees work close to the customers and as such have first-class information about these customers and the most important information about the product itself—where it is deficient, what competitors are doing concerning prices, and the materials used in making the products the competitors are using. In this global economy, is it better to develop another niche differentiating Levi Strauss products from others around the world? Of course, the employees will develop a sense of belonging if they are allowed to participate formally in the decision-making process. Even then, the pride of being a contributor in the company accounts for many of individual creative ideas.

Barriers to Communication in the Workplace

The most serious barriers to communication in the workplace are psychological; they reside in fears, misgivings, preoccupations, unrealistic expectations, and distrustful relationships. Even though managers spend most of their day actively communicating in meetings and informal, face-to-face encounters, over the telephone, through computer lines, and other correspondence and reports, employees have long complained about the lack of communication. Employees want to feel more included in the workplace and be part of the flow of information and communication (Tjosvold et al., 1995).

Here we go again with the word dialogue. The managers’ communication with employees is difficult, yet the employees still want to feel more included and be a part of the flow of information. This means that what the employees wanted was to be a part of the decision-making process and offer recommendations to the higher authorities. Of course this could be well done by a well-documented dialogue format. Sometimes what we really want is similar to someone building a church to an unknown god; while you don’t exactly know the god, you are building the church for an unknown god because the fact is that you have something in mind that you cannot explain. Even so, in most businesses and organizations, employees have seen much, heard much, and had much to contribute, but they cannot remember the barriers, especially fears and distrustful relationships, because what they said could backfire on them. The managers’ intense communication efforts will do little or nothing to improve the condition of things in the workplace. In some cases, managers or business owners try their best to improve employee conditions at the workplace by doing the following:

• paying employees to watch games like baseball, basketball, and football

• paying for employees to enjoy meals in the best restaurants

• providing cash benefits

• watching movies

• paying for days off

Of course, all of the above and much more are what the leader wanted, not exactly what the employees wanted. Employees simply want to participate in the decision-making process. The fact is that they do the same job five days a week and sometimes over a longer time; as such, they have more to say and do, but they seem not to have the opportunity to do so. Rather, their bosses will be likely to lecture them and assess them based on what they say or don’t say. This does not solve any problems but keeps the company problems alive and mounting. The elusive solution of many managers is that whenever a company is in financial difficulties, they take it out on the employees, possibly by laying off some of them or lecturing them as if they were children because the managers believe the employees are the source of the problem.

What Employees Want

1. They want to participate in the decision-making process.

2. They want to make recommendations to the higher authorities.

3. They would like to work harder by implementing the right policies.

4. They believe that since they do the jobs they know where the problems are located and that if they were allowed to make recommendations, the problems could be solved and job security could be a dream come true.

5. They want the pride of being a part of the decision-making process, a motivating factor in the workplace.

The new economy includes contributions from all the people concerned. The hierarchical system can go hand in hand with team-based organization only if the executives let go of rigidity in power and a final decision is made through a dialogical process where all concerned can participate.

Flip-Flopping

In business, flip-flopping is the way to go, because its opposite is rigidity. Flip-flopping is an artistic work. In fact, the decision a company makes today may be modified tomorrow based on any new information. This is also called flexibility. As a matter of today’s economy, flexibility is necessary to acquire market share because we deal with different nationalities and different cultures. Even in the same company, in the interest of compromise, a company has to be flexible in its dealings with the customers. A business leader must understand that short-term profitability has to balance with its long-term effectiveness, and that has to be done through artistic work and flexibility. Flip-flopping in politics is viewed as a negative, but that should not be the case. Flip-flopping simply means that the information received later has explained the facts beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore the understanding has changed. Therefore, in business, as in politics, flip-flopping is not bad at all. It is a question of realignment in any undertaking.

During team meetings, members have been asked to discard all the feelings and judgments they may be harboring in their minds or may have some feelings about the discussions the team made, thinking it may not enable them to make good recommendations. However, after much information and explanations from teammates, you may hear something like, Okay, I see, I am convinced, and That’s right. At that point, everyone in the meeting will understand that many minds have been changed. If there were other counter-information that might be termed much more appropriate, then the recommendations would be very different and unpredictable by any standard. Again, flip-flopping is a change of mind and flexibility that is required of life itself.

A Team Approach

It is a long-standing truism that organizational change does not happen unless the people at the top are committed to change, but it is also true that an inspiring vision is not going to happen unless people in the middle and lower levels of the organization are committed. A vision cannot inspire by itself; managers and workers have to want to be inspired. The vision of the organization needs to be reinforced by a team approach to developing it (Tjosvold et al., 1995).

A team approach includes

1. dialogue, and

2. recommendations for the decision-making process.

How to Start a Dialogue

Suspension of thoughts, judgments, etc., is at the very heart of dialogue and is one of its most important aspects. It is not easily grasped, because the activity is both unfamiliar and subtle. Suspension involves attention, listening, and looking and is essential to exploration. Speaking is necessary, of course, for without it there would be little in the dialogue to explore (Bohm, Factor, & Garrett, 1996).

Recommendation

The actual process of exploration takes place during listening—not only to others but also to oneself. Members inquire deeply into assumptions and learn through inquiry and disclosures from where they arrive at a shared meaning. Exploration and inquiry are used in place of argument and debate. When members have checked through their inquiries, assumptions, and explorations and still maintain the same shared meaning; hence, accepted recommendations by members. Recommendation is not decision making; it is a decision-making process that the higher authorities may use for final decision making.

Dialogue works best with a group of between twenty and forty people or employees seated facing one another in a single circle. A group of this size allows for the emergence and observation of different subgroups or subcultures that can help to reveal some of the ways in which thought operates connectively. This is important, because the differences between such subcultures are often an unrecognized cause of failed communications and conflict. Smaller groups, on the other hand, lack the requisite diversity needed to reveal these tendencies and will generally emphasize more familiar personal and family roles and relationships (Bohm et al., 1991).

Duration

A dialogue needs some time to get going. It is an unusual way of participating with one other, and some sort of introduction is required in which the meaning of the whole actually can be communicated. However, even with a clear introduction, when the group begins to talk together, the group will often experience confusion, frustration, and a self-conscious concern as to whether or not there is actual dialogue.

It would be very optimistic to assume that a dialogue would begin to flow or move forward with any great depth during the group’s first meeting. It is important to point out that perseverance is required. The more regularly the group can meet, the deeper and more meaningful will be the territory explored (Bohm et al., 1991).

Finally, Bohm et al. (1991) has found that in the early stages some guidance is required to help the participants realize the subtle differences between dialogue and other forms of group process. At least one, or preferably two, experienced facilitators are essential. Their role should be to occasionally point out situations that might seem to be presenting sticking points for the group; in other words, to aid the process of collective perception. However, these interventions should never be manipulative or obtrusive. Leaders are participants just like everyone else. Guidance, when it is felt to be necessary, should take the form of leading from behind and preserve the intention of making itself redundant as quickly as possible.

I need to point out that dialogue may sound religious, but it is applicable to every discipline, though practiced differently. For example, in politics, secretaries or ministers sit in a round-table conference with the president or prime minister when major decisions are being considered. In other words, in politics, dialogue is conducted from the top, while the implications are felt right down the rungs of the ladder. In business, dialogue is a decision-making process made by a team of employees in the form of recommendations to the top officers for consideration during the making of a final decision. In short, in business every employee is encouraged to participate in the decision-making process and recommendations.

Team-based organizations are very democratic, make efficient recommendations, and in most cases are very useful to the company. However, the efficiency of the final decision depends in most situations on the information the team members were given with which to work. For instance, if some information is deleted in the interest of the security of the company, the recommendations from the team most definitely will reflect the information gap. Evidently, such recommendations might solve few, if any, problems. In situations such as this, only the top management knew that incomplete information has been passed on to the team for deliberation, even though the dialogue was funded by the company. Actions like that could arise for the following reasons:

1. The company’s top executives might not have been so interested in any recommendations, because they had already made up their minds on the issue.

2. The company simply wants to find the team incompetent.

3. The company may be trying to do away with team-based organizations.

4. The top executives may be incompetent.

5. The executives may not know the usefulness of team recommendations because even though the team has been passing on recommendations to the top executives, the executives had never looked at the recommendations during the final decision-making process.

6. The top executives may feel that the workers had no academic qualifications to back up the recommendations; therefore, they will not take these seriously.

7. The company may be pretending to be a team-based organization simply to attract potential inventors who know the usefulness of employee participation in the decision-making process.

In a hierarchical organization, things are a lot different than in a team-based organization. The following diagrams reveals this.

In a hierarchical organization, decisions are made from top to bottom, meaning that employees do not participate in the decision-making process; they are simply to be seen and not heard. However, this does not mean that employees are abused by not allowing them to participate. That has nothing to do with low or high salaries. Human satisfaction is insatiable; when monetary aspects are satisfied, other areas will open up. When these are not satisfied, the problem of dissatisfaction persists. Business is as sensitive as Wall Street itself. Just making employees uncomfortable may cause the following:

• feelings of not being a part of the company

• lessened productivity

• low morale

• distrust of the company management

• suspicion of whatever the executives do

The migration of teamwork designs from the factory floor to the administrative, technical services and managerial components of organizations has raised questions about the applicability of each design in these settings. Existing organizational design theory offers only general guidelines for team-based organizations. Organizations have struggled to implement team structures that, while offering great promise for helping meet the heightened performance requirements of the new global economy, pose monumental design challenges and result in tumultuous change (Mohrman et al., 1995).

Changes that have affected organizational life over the past twenty-five years have forced students and practitioners alike to reexamine these trends. Certainly, a strong strain of individualism is alive in the world nurtured in the spirit of democracy. However, the complexity of the environment and the goal structure of the enterprise create a situation in which it is no longer possible to comprehend or conduct the operation of the enterprise without some form of teamwork and team building (McGregor, 1967).

The use of teams and training mechanisms to integrate organizations laterally has increased dramatically in recent years. This is because many organizations, especially those that are highly complex, have found that traditional hierarchical and functional approaches are inadequate to address their coordination needs in a timely and cost-effective manner. During the past three decades, an increasing number of production settings have found that companies could significantly improve their effectiveness by establishing teams that have responsibility for a whole part of the work. These teams have been described as empowered because in theory they do not have to seek hierarchical approval for many of their decisions about how to do their work. They are also sometimes referred to as self-managing because they perform for themselves many tasks such as scheduling and monitoring performance (Mohrman et al., 1995, p. 198).

In a team-based organization, teams are integrated performing units. Their effectiveness depends on whether the business unit in which they are embedded has been designed to support integrated work. In knowledge settings that house nonroutine duties, the key challenge of an organization is to create structures and processes that foster the integration of the work of people with diverse knowledge bases and the work of a dynamic constellation of interdependent teams (Mohrman et al., 1995).

It is true that the spirit of democracy exists in team building and teamwork as a whole, but one should understand that democratic principles are not the motivating factors here. This is a business organization that wants to show a profit or the aftermath bottom line. Therefore, the decision to build a team-based organization is a business decision and not a political decision. Teamwork may seem political because it requires everybody in the business to take part in the decision-making process, just as voting is required for electing someone running for political office. However, teamwork concerns itself primarily with building a profitable company.

In fact, teamwork is also perfect for so-called communist countries; the Chinese are a perfect example. Even though team building is authorized by the government, the result turns out perfectly. Here is how it works over there: The government wants perfect Olympic results, whatever that might mean, but different games were selected and coaches were assigned to teams with assistant coaches. If things are no longer equal, the coach and assistants have to sit down with an athlete to resolve differences and get back on track with the performance training. Of course, the profit isn’t always money. In the case of the Olympics, it was about medals and maintaining a certain level in the world of sports. The most important outcomes were that the athletes were given the opportunity to participate in the decision-making process. This is actually a democratic principle that the communist government implemented without realizing that they had jumped to the democratic world just because it was the approach they wanted to drive them to their desired destination. The fact here is that the team approach may be used by any system of government.

Consultants serve useful purposes in organizations, but why have consultants when you already have a group of engineers, salespeople, human resources specialists, and other groups of employees working for the organization? These employees do the work every day; they have an idea of what goes on in the company. If they are properly organized in a team fashion, of course they will turn out to be great assets for the company in a period of time. The whole business of consultants is like wearing your own shoes and then hiring someone to tell you where you have problems with your shoes. I am not sure it makes any sense.

One day I walked into a post office processing plant and saw supervisors standing with a group of employees. Supposedly, the employees were receiving instructions on how to do a job better. I knew at once that the plant required team-based management. The supervisors had been at one time or another employees in the plant, but things had changed, including the technology, so the supervisors could not possibly tell the employees why certain things happened there. Another problem I noticed was the fact that at a certain stage the machines simply stopped operating after having been used for many hours. Again, this made me realize that the facility needed a team structure. Teamwork may be very good in pointing out the root causes and possible solutions to problems. Some of the team members should know specifically when the machines ceased to function and possibly when they were operational. More deliberations and questions could be answered when recommendations are made. There are many companies like this US post office processing plant.

Many authors have written about teamwork, but many of them will tell you that there are effective ways of organizing teamwork apart from the setting. I have said many times that management is an artistic work, and no one should tell you to focus on some aspects and forget about others. In teamwork, as in other aspects of management, the setting must be right and members should be facing one another, preferably in a round-table type conference. In addition, the full story must be given to the participants and members must be free to ask questions and make statements that may be termed controversial with no fear of retribution. They have to have a secretary, and the leader is actually the moderator but is not allowed to interrupt or interfere with the proceedings of the team members.

The most important drawback to team recommendation is the information that is required for the recommendation itself. In computer lessons we learn garbage in, garbage out (GIGO), meaning that whatever information you put in the computer is the information you get back. If for some reason the company executives decide to limit information that is expected to be given to the team, then of course the company should not expect a better recommendation. That, of course, is a very poor management style. So before a company decides to set up a team for deliberations, they must ensure the following:

• that the problems are known

• that every team members is properly informed of the problem(s)

• that the background of the case is related in full to team members

• that members have the freedom to ask and comment upon issues with no fear of punishment or reprisal

• that the members are free to be on the team and may leave the team with no fear of punishment or reprisal

• that team members are informed by the leaders that they are not deliberating for a mere exercise but that the teamwork is for the solution of the problem(s) about which they have been informed; most importantly, they must know that the recommendations expected of them will make a huge difference in whether the company stays in business or goes out of business, which also will have an effect on their jobs (this is not said to scare the members but to keep them busy and thoughtful on their deliberations and recommendations)