Book Preview/Serialization Organisational Magic

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At Pentacle The Virtual Business School we believe in customer involvement. We also believe in providing our customers with the best inputs as early as possible. As a result we are serialising on this web page the latest book from Professor Eddie Obeng. Achieving Organisational Magic!. Written in same style as his previous best-sellers All Change! Putting Strategy to Work and Making Re-engineering Happen, Achieving Organisational Magic provides thorough and concept leadership in the clear and effective development of virtual organisations.

Read and enjoy!

Achieving

Organisational
Magic!

breathing life into the virtual organisation

Eddie Obeng

Preface & Acknowledgements

Chapter 1
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OF MISTLETOE AND TIN CANS

Should I stay and work harder?. Harder and longer, night day and weekend until I am on top of it. Or should I get away. Get away from it all and take the time to think, think new, clear thoughts. Thoughts which will help me work better, maybe even smarter. Knowing that all the time whilst I invent new and better ways the backlog grows and grows.
Through the rectangle of glass to my left, in a rapid but arrhythmic pattern, tree after tree glides past. Each silent and graceful like a champion skater. Steady, silent and graceful. Tree after tree seems overburdened with mistletoe. The mistletoe sits high and low perched on and between branches like the nests of some large untidy bird. A bird who had skipped the ‘Introduction to nest making’ course and had therefore not quite understood the need to make a nest capable of holding eggs, a tight structure to keep out the wind and rain but rather whose attempts result in a nest too large with too little material and who in frustration had simply abandoned that nest and tried again and again on the same tree, moving on to the next tree only once there was no more room for any further failed attempts.
Through the stationary rectangle of glass directly ahead of me come pictures of people, bob sleighs, cable cars and mountains. People on bob sleighs, people getting into cable cars, and people travelling in various ways down snow covered mountains. The scenes flash rapidly from one to another. The glass rectangle is on a box slung high and close to the ceiling of the coach. Above the gently bobbing head of the coach driver. The scenes in this rectangle are accompanied by sounds.
Both rectangles tempt. Both shout out silently but insistently “Look at me. Look at me.” But I ignore both. Instead I caress the head resting on my left shoulder. Gently moving it backward to what will be a more comfortable position. Backwards towards the headrest. There is no response to my actions. I’m not surprised the owner of the head is fast asleep.
I’ve taken a gamble. I’ve gambled on getting away from it. I’ve gambled that I will be able to think new, clear thoughts which will easily banish the backlog that I am even now adding to, simply by getting away from it. I desperately need to win the gamble.
I look ahead briefly over the rows and rows of seats in front of me. Head and shoulder cut-outs stuck on each seat, dark grey silhouettes. I close my eyes tightly to shut out both tempting rectangles hoping desperately that I don’t fall asleep. I’m trying to understand what to do next. I need to reflect on how I got to this point in time. This point in my life. The twists and turns of life that have made my current situation the most probable. I guess the obvious thing to do is to start at the start.
It’s almost two years to the day since I started Mega-Tel. “Gosh!” I exclaim silently to myself. ‘Has it really been that long?’ I think. I could have sworn it was only yesterday that I was thanking all my colleagues at Globocomms for their kind wishes. Only yesterday that I had my ‘leaving’ party.
It was a Friday. A dress down Friday. We stood around. A very colourful gaggle of people in the congregational area of the open plan office. An area marked out using carpet tiles a slightly lighter shade of grey than the work areas or walkways. Mostly standing, some sitting some resting on partitions with me as the centre of attraction. Only yesterday that I stood opening leaving presents. There was one parcel which was an obvious candidate for being opened first. It aroused my curiosity. It was two foot by two foot by two foot, very light and rustled slightly when I shook it seeking clues to what was inside. It was beautifully wrapped and I peeled back the layers with care. It was a good joke. I raised the final flap of the box, clawed away an ocean of white packaging worms, only to find two tin cans; a three metre long piece of black twine and a red card printed on one side in stylised Gothic Script ‘MEGA-TEL’ and on the other ‘Instructions for setting up your own telecommunications network!’ Everyone, including me, had howled with laughter. Twenty seconds later with long thin, fast and agile hands, Tim, one of our project leaders, had constructed the ‘phone system and people were queuing up to try it out.
What cheek! What arrogance! To even think that I could create an organisation, and even more so, an organisation in one of the most competitive and fastest growing parts of the economy. To even contemplate such an audacious idea! But that was exactly what I had done or to be more honest was struggling to do. I’d even decided to call my company Mega-Tel hence the joke about the primitive phone.
The real start to the story was two years previously, After 15 years of hard work and loyal service at Globocomms Inc., I had ‘made it’ at last. The organisation had just acquired a new chairman and I was made the organisation’s first Chief Operating Officer. I was ecstatic. I spent the first week after my promotion was announced performing the neat trick of walking on a very thin but dense cushion of air, like wearing a really trendy, technically whizzy pair of air sole Nikes but without the actual shoes. And then came the fall. I hit the earth with a large and heavy bump.
I knew that I had the standard three months to make an impact. That was usually the length of a honeymoon period, so I’d spent time gathering operational information, financial information and walking the halls talking and listening to people. What I discovered shocked me, no let’s be truthful, scared the stuffing out of me. I’d thought it was three months for me to make an impact but it was more like four months. Four months to impact. Four months until Globocomms was going to be in big financial trouble.
The problem seemed relatively straight forward. The solution however was not so obvious or simple to carry out. Like most organisations in the industry we had grown and grown fast. We had grown not just our revenues but also our costs and it seemed that we’d overgrown our fixed costs. The costs which stay the same however much your revenues change. This had largely been as a result of our thinking on economies of scale as we’d put in new infrastructure, cables, switches, people, facilities. In the early days we’d found that any expansion in capacity was quickly used up, so now, I discovered, we justified new capacity not on the basis of pay back but on the ability to support a future larger business. We’d also lost touch with our customers. Well, to be honest the customer had never really been King but at least we thought about them from time to time. Usually at budget time when we tried to guess how much of their money we could relive them of. Sure it was no surprise that we’d lost focus on them as we’d grown but what was a surprise was that we’d also lost our ability to accurately track and bill them. As if that wasn’t bad enough the growth in demand for mobile phones, the ultimate fashion accessory was eating hard into our expected revenue. That and the increased demand for point to point low cost systems. The crunch was on its way and it wasn’t far off. Something had to be done and done fast.
I knew that I had to act fast and I did. I set up a series of projects, a program to get something done to get something fixed anything fixed and fast. I prioritised on the billing system. I knew that at any time Globocomms had Ł14.2 million un-billed, outstanding or unpaid and we worked to get it down. The problem was huge The real headache was that our billing process and software had been purchased and set up on an assumption that we would have a turnover approximately a tenth of what we had. That made it slow, it crashed often and lost records. By the time we got round to invoicing some customer’s they’d moved on moved addresses and couldn’t be tracked down. It was embarrassing to be so inept. Our new solution took a while to get going. Meanwhile the profit and cash squeeze was getting tighter, two months on I was called in by the Chairman and asked what I thought we should do to reduce the costs as well as getting in revenues. I’d suggested re-engineering.
Then it was all the rage to re-engineer your organisation. So we did. This was in the early heady days before the world discovered that re-engineering often simply meant head count reduction. In the days when you could actually use the words without receiving a barrage of insults from staff or watch your share price collapse as all your key people fled the organisation.
I’d done the standard thing. I’d brought in some consultants. Given them a brief and let go. They had suggested that we needed to radically change all the key processes in the company and start from scratch. I nodded and agreed and stopping only to appoint Tim Project leader of the project, Project Consumer, I let them loose.
They spent their first month studying Globocomms organisation, along with groups of staff and long rolls of brown parcel paper creating process maps of what they called the ‘as is’. I can still clearly remember the first presentation they made to me. A month of covering our walls with patches of blu tac, they invited us to an update. We sat in the main board room.
The Main Boardroom was a thin long powder blue room with east facing windows only. Sitting on the right hand side of the table was a real disadvantage in the morning since you were steadily blinded by the rays of sunlight which would sneak in between the slats of the blind and zap you in the eyes with laser precision. It was not a good idea to be late to meetings in the morning. Being late meant sitting on the right hand side. I arrived early and was sitting on the left hand side half way down the left hand side next to Tim. On my right was Fred Jones who ran the sales force. The consultants stood in a huddle in the front right hand corner, like a group of schoolboys showing each other their latest Nintendo games, it was as if they were afraid to let anyone in on what they had discovered and then, obviously at a secret sign, they had taken their places and the presentation started. They had converted their work onto acetates. Acetates of text. Text that was too small to read on the projector. To prevent us developing migraines from squinting at the text, we were each provided with an inch thick bound set of copy of all the slides. Then they went through slide it, slide after slide after unintelligible slide. An hour into the presentation and my eyelids were becoming magnetic. Well, at least it seemed so. The upper lids were being strongly drawn towards the lower lids by a mysterious invisible force. The presentation was horribly boring. Then, suddenly, Fred, always looking for a humorous angle leaned across to me and in a loud whisper said. ‘Death by acetate’. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. The noise I made was more of a snort. Every one turned to look at me. I tried to cover up my error by getting my handkerchief out and blowing my nose hard, twice. But it was true. This presentation was like every other presentation from one of the more established, larger consultant firms and he was right absolutely spot on, ‘Death by acetate’.
Slowly, with the stealth driven by the fact that they were charging us by the hour, they unveiled what they had discovered with what they called our “top level” processes. There seemed to be thirteen of them. Thirteen carefully defined processes which covered all the work we currently did. Below the top level processes there were what they called secondary processes. We had processes for everything under the sun, for grading staff, for control, for checking, signing and approvals for product launches for capital requests, Some were long and tortuous but complete whilst other seemed completely ad-hoc. They only happened because the people involved in them made them happen, and that was only sometimes. But to me, what struck me most, was that there seemed to be only three processes which seemed directly to have anything to do with providing the services the customer was actually after.
I was curious. I rushed in. I asking, “Why, er.” I suddenly paused realising that the consultants hadn’t remarked on the fact that less than a third of our effort appeared to be directed at servicing the customer and that there was probably a very obvious and simple explanation, “are there only three processes related to delivering what the customer is actually after?” I finish hesitantly. It didn’t make sense to me that 25% of our processes were focused on what we actually existed for.
The senior consultant, used his “consultants voice” on me. You know the voice, helpful yet patronising almost monotone but with sparkles of inflection. the tone which says ‘I’m only explaining this again because you’re the client but do try to keep up!’ All this spoken with hands neatly placed on the edge of the table and the fingers in the temple position as if praying for strength. He said something unintelligible, well at least I didn’t understand it, about alignment and focus. I’d backed down, I didn’t ask for an explanation in plain English but a single thought stuck in my head and stuck tightly. ‘What if we could build a company based on only the three processes?’ What would that mean?’
The teams worked long and hard on process maps, on transparencies to explain the process maps and then on more process maps. It all seemed endless. In short, eventually after three months they encouraged us to ‘bet the company’. To bet the company on a set of ideas that they had had. In short to bet the company on several hundred little yellows post-its stuck on sheets of brown paper.
As the project continued the consultants decided to re-engineer the sales process. This was my first glimpse that the project was not going as well as hoped.
Fred Jones had been extremely unhappy with the first set of results where the process he was responsible for was described as; IDENTIFY CONSUMER - FIND NEEDS - CREATE PRODUCT - SELL TO CONSUMER. Fred felt that this was all too simplistic and that the consultants were encouraging us in the wrong direction. One evening just as I was leaving for the day he had stepped out of his office and blocked my way in the corridor refusing to let me go any further. He complained vigorously about the way he felt Project Consumer was going and had thrust a copy of a book into my hand. He refused to let me continue on my way until I had promised that I would read it and act on what I learnt. The book was titled ‘What’s wrong with your organisation anyway' Normally I’m too busy to read books and normally I avoid business books but I’d promised so I guess I had to. I never really trust books I’m always afraid that I they will make me lazy in my thinking and that I will allow them to replace my own thinking. “You must never let a book replace your own thinking!” , years ago, when I was a teenager I’d read that warning somewhere in a book.
I’d taken Fred’s book with me on my next business trip. It was a short trip to Ireland. I’d started reading it on the flight over. I’d become hooked. I’d surprised my self by first excusing myself early from a rather enjoyable post-meeting drinking session and then further surprised myself by staying up half the night trying to get to the end.
I guess I should have known that there was something unusual about the book. The first impression you got of the book was of something strange. It seemed to be back to front. By back to front I mean it had two front covers so half the text was upside down depending at which end you started. In both of the two forewords there had been some marketing blurb about the need to re-engineer the way in which business books are written. The rest of the book was in two parts, half of it was racy novel about a chap working for a service business. This bit covered the key principles of re-engineering and the other half was, in detail, a set of all the tools and techniques which were described in the novel.
Like all life coincidences happen. On the journey back from the meeting, reading the in-flight magazine, I’d spotted an advertisement on the back page for a conference on Delivering Core Competences through Re-engineered Processes and guess who the keynote speaker was? Yes easy isn’t it. It was the author of the book which had just kept me up half the night.
I’d gone to the conference, of course, and taken Tim and three of my team with me. It had been fun but more important for me it had confirmed my suspicions of what the consultants had been making us do. And it confirmed my earlier recognition that there was only a small proportion of the process activity we were engaged in which had any relevance to serving customers or making money. Soon my mind was made up. I was determined to build my three process, telecommunications company. The rest is history. Two years of history. “Gosh”
The coach has started its steady and relentless climb from foothills into the mountains now I measure progress not by the trees but by the hairpin bends. Even now we rush up to one. From my seat I have a very restricted view to the left. The right hand side the ground falls rapidly away and ahead I can see empty space. It is as if the driver, a suicidal maniac is rushing us forward to take us for a plunge, a plunge over a precipice and several hundred feet down. Down to a short but final union of coach with earth. And then, hurrah! The coach swings wildly to the left and land is in sight once more. I can stop holding my breath for now. For now that is, until the next bend.
So what has happened? I ask myself what has gone well and what not so well. Well, I think the process idea seems to be working relatively well but it’s difficult to get others to understand or follow the processes. and then I start to be honest with myself. A lot of things haven’t worked as planned. Empowerment, customer focus, recruiting team players, understanding what is happening to the money, the wrong competitor information. slithering accountabilities. The catalogue seems to run and run. I’m trying out all the things I wanted to support my three process company and a lot of it seems to give me more hassle than results. I think to myself I guess I’ve got a week to get to the bottom of all this and work out how it’s all going.
The road seems narrower now as the coach continues its heart stopping cycle, apparently swinging off the road and recovering only at the last minute by swinging round a previously unseen bend. The emotional ups and downs remind me of our cash flow position. Falling slowly and steadily towards oblivion only to recover at the last minute of the month only to start the cycle again.
All said, business so far has been good. One useful thing I did do which worked was that I spent a weekend benchmarking us against Globocomms and on all the key parameters we seem to be at least 30% ahead. That feels great but I’m worried about the effort sheer force, exertion and gritted determination it takes just to keep things going. But it’s still early days.
We near the end of our journey. Tidy wooden, chalet style houses gather in increasingly tight clusters by the road and up the hillsides. These are the tidy ones. Built in varnished wood. Neat and well kept as holiday homes often are and real homes in the mountains seldom are. The brown earth is now covered with ever growing patches of white. The head resting on my left shoulder rocks slightly drawing my attention. It makes my thoughts move from past reflection to present, here and now. It nestles again making my thoughts continue the journey from the present to the future. To this one week ahead of rest and fun. I’m slowly getting into pre-apres-ski mood. I can now almost taste the mulled wine I am bound to be drinking tomorrow.