The Strategy That Wouldn’t Travel

It was 6:45 p.m. Karen Jiménez was reviewing the notes on her team-based productivity project for what seemed like the hundredth time. In two days, she was scheduled to present a report to the senior management group on the project’s progress. She wasn’t at all sure what she was going to say. The project was designed to improve productivity and morale at each plant owned and operated by Acme Minerals Extraction Company. Phase one—implemented in early 1995 at the site in Wichita, Kansas—looked like a stunning success by the middle of 1996. Productivity and morale soared, and operating and maintenance costs decreased significantly. But four months ago, Jiménez tried to duplicate the results at the project’s second target—the plant in Lubbock, Texas—and something went wrong. The techniques that had worked so well in Wichita met with only moderate success in Lubbock. Productivity improved marginally and costs went down a bit, but morale actually seemed to deteriorate slightly. Jiménez was stumped. She tried to “helicopter up” and think about the problem in the broad context of the company’s history. A few years ago, Acme had been in bad financial shape, but what had really brought things to a head—and had led to her current dilemma—was a labor relations problem. Acme had a wide variety of labor requirements for its operations. The company used highly sophisticated technology, employing geologists, geophysicists, and engineers on what was referred to as the “brains” side of the business, as well as skilled and semiskilled labor on the “brawn” side to run the extraction operations. And in the summer of 1994, brains and brawn clashed in an embarrassingly public way. A number of engineers at the Wichita plant locked several union workers out of the offices in 100-degree heat. Although most Acme employees now felt that the incident had been blown out of proportion by the press, the board of directors had used the bad publicity as an excuse to push out an aging chief executive and bring in new blood in the form of Bill Daniels. The board had asked Daniels to lead the company in part because he came from a prominent management-consulting firm that was noted for its approach to teamwork and change. As it turned out, he had proved a good choice. Daniels was a hands-on, high-energy, charismatic businessman who seemed to enjoy media attention. Within his first year as CEO, he had pretty much righted the floundering company by selling off some unrelated lines of business. He had also created the shared-services department—an internal consulting organization providing change management, reengineering, total quality management, and other services—and had tapped Jiménez to head the group. Her first priority, Daniels told her, would be to improve productivity and morale at the company’s five extraction sites. None of them were meeting their projections. And although Wichita was the only site at which the labor-management conflict was painfully apparent, Daniels and Jiménez both thought that morale needed an all-around boost. Hence the team-based productivity project. At the time, Jiménez felt up to the task. She had joined Acme in her late twenties with an M.B.A. and a few years at a well-known consulting firm under her belt. She had been at the helm of more than a few successful change efforts. And in the ten years since she joined Acme, she had gained experience in a number of midlevel positions. With a hardworking team of her own in tow, Jiménez commenced work. First, she decided on a battle plan. For several reasons, Wichita seemed ideal as an inaugural site. Under the former CEO, the site had spent long periods of time on the market. The plant consistently underperformed, and the old regime wanted to be rid of it. Periodically, frustrated by the lack of what he considered serious offers, the former CEO ordered improvement programs, which were always abandoned after a short time. Jiménez believed that the failures of those change programs were predictable: expectations had been unrealistic, there had been little commitment from management, and the improvement-project team members had been given little authority to implement changes. As she considered her mission at Wichita, Jiménez was certain that her new political clout combined with her experience as a consultant would make the project manageable. Moreover, she reasoned that because many previous efforts had failed, her efforts would look doubly good if the project succeeded. If it failed, the situation could be positioned with the proper spin as an intractable set of problems that no one could solve. The biggest problem at Wichita was clearly that labor and management didn’t get along. As a result, costs to maintain the heavy equipment were significantly out of line with those incurred by other operations. Wichita’s high fixed costs and razor-thin margins meant that every dollar saved in maintenance was a dollar of profit. While operating costs were high, too, they weren’t nearly as high as maintenance costs. Jiménez set about fixing the labor relations problem. And although things hadn’t improved as smoothly or as quickly as she had hoped, Wichita was a great success. The problem was, Daniels had wasted no time in touting the early successes to stakeholders. In fact, not long after the Wichita project had gotten under way, he described it at great length in a speech to the Financial Analysts’ Society on Wall Street. With characteristic embellishment, he cited the project as a vision for the future of Acme—indeed, he called it the organization for the twenty-first century. He all but told the analysts that the Wichita model would soon be rolled out through the entire enterprise. Jiménez knew that reproducing Wichita’s success might not be accomplished in a cookie-cutter fashion. Jiménez had been furious—and more than a little frightened. She didn’t want her feet held to the fire like that; she knew that reproducing Wichita’s success might not be possible and that even if it were, it might not be accomplished in a cookie-cutter fashion. In fact, she had tried to let Daniels know of her feelings on more than a few occasions, long before he spouted off to Wall Street. She had met with him and sent him reports, E-mail, and memos. The message, it seemed, had fallen on deaf ears. Inside Wichita Jiménez looked at the clock again: it was now 7:30. The $ 75 million project that could bring Acme into the twenty-first century was listing, she mused, and so was her career. She looked at her computer screen for inspiration, but it was blank. Maybe if she reviewed the success story once more. She opened the file marked “Wichita” and studied the work-process flowchart. The site had been unexceptional in almost every way. There were three functional groups: operations, which consisted of hourly workers who operated and maintained the extraction equipment; “below ground,” a group composed of engineers, geologists, and geophysicists who determined where and how to drill for the desired minerals; and “above ground,” a group of engineers in charge of cursory refinement and transportation of the minerals. Before the team project had been put in motion, Wichita had shown little coordination or communication among these groups. Jiménez knew that she had had at least one stroke of good luck in Wichita in the form of David Keller. Keller, a 39-year Acme veteran, had been looking for one last job before he retired, and he wanted it to be in Wichita, where his family had lived for 8 years earlier in his career. He wanted to retire there. Keller was widely respected in the company and Jiménez genuinely liked him. So, with the blessing of Daniels and the other senior managers, she had appointed him project leader. She smiled as she thought about Keller. He was a Korean War vet who had relocated several times for Acme, serving in just about every possible line and staff position. He joined the company in 1957 and was immediately baptized in the dust and heat of North Africa, where the company had set up operations soon after World War II. Keller was a link to Acme’s heady past, when it had thought nothing of clearing Allied land mines planted in the desert in its drive to expand. It struck Jiménez that Keller had joined the company before she was born. Jiménez thought about the Wichita project’s rough spots. One of them had been the institution of a monthly “problem chat,” an optional meeting open to all staff to discuss unresolved problems. No one attended the first one. She and Keller sat there nervously, together eating six doughnuts before she called a secretary and had them carted away. But over time, people began to show up. After about four months, the meetings were well-attended, lively problem-solving discussions that actually produced some improvements. In one case, a maintenance worker explained to a facilities engineer that one of the standard equipment configurations was failing as a result of high levels of heat and sand contamination, resulting in occasional downtime. With Keller mediating, the complaint had been taken well, without the usual friction. The engineer easily fabricated a new configuration more suitable to the conditions, and downtime was virtually eliminated. Such insights were common at the problem chats. Previously, no organizational mechanism had existed for capturing solutions or transferring them to other parts of the operation. Jiménez and Keller then introduced teams to “select a problem and implement a tailored solution,” or SPITS. These were ad hoc groups made up of members from each of the functional areas. The groups were formed to work on a specific project identified in a problem chat; they were disbanded when the problem was solved. It was the implementation of SPITS teams that led some eight months later to a wholesale reorganization of the Wichita work site. Jiménez believed that SPITS had been a breakthrough that had shown her how to boost productivity and morale—the goal that Daniels had set for her. The program had given cross-functional teams of 12 to 15 people from operations, above ground, and below ground the responsibility and authority to address problems as they occurred without seeking the approval of management. Jiménez reminded herself that even after SPITS there were still some rocky moments in Wichita. Some engineers resented having to work the alongside operations personnel. They told Keller, “These miners don’t understand why we do what we do.” Likewise, some operations staff balked at having to work with engineers who “knew how to mine only on a computer screen.” But one year into the pilot, things began to hum. People weren’t just working together, they were socializing together. At one of the problem chats, an operations worker jokingly suggested that the brains and the brawn duke it out once a week to get rid of the tensions. Keller jumped on the joke and had T-shirts made that said brains and brawn; he then challenged the groups to square off weekly in a softball game. Early into the first game, a 200-pound miner slammed into a thin, wiry engineer at home plate, and Jiménez, watching from the sidelines, was sure that her corporate change plan had just been called out. But the engineer simply dusted himself off, laughing and swearing at the same time. At the next game, the engineer showed up wearing knee and shoulder pads, and Jiménez heard both his colleagues and the operations guys laughing. She knew something had changed. Later that night at a bar, the beer flowed in massive quantities, but she happily picked up the check. Her brains and brawn shirt now hung on her office wall—a symbol of everything that was wrong and everything that was possible. Cookie-Cutter Conundrum Jiménez again came back to the present. She closed the file, got up abruptly, and grabbed her coat. She needed some air and some food and decided to walk the two blocks to the local sandwich joint. She felt a little like an inventor who has just developed a great new invention that is certain to make the company tons of money. “That’s great!” an imaginary boss replies. “Now give me another 50 just like it!” As she walked, she tried to think objectively about the Lubbock site. Lubbock was in better shape than Wichita to begin with, but not by much. Operating costs there were too high, and the plant rarely met its production goals. Acme had considered divesting itself of Lubbock on more than one occasion. When Jiménez initially planned the team-based productivity rollout, she had thought of Lubbock as a beta site; any kinks from Wichita would be worked out there, and then the plan would be rolled out to the rest of the company over a two-year period. The shared-services department didn’t have the staff to oversee Wichita’s fine-tuning and concentrate on Lubbock as well, so Jiménez assigned only one of her top internal consultants, Jennifer Peterson, and two of Peterson’s staff to the Lubbock project. She then engaged Daniels’s former consulting firm and assigned Dave Matthews, a vice president of the firm, on-site responsibility. Bad news seemed to dog Jiménez at every turn. For example, Keller declined to be a part of the team. Mystified and a little hurt, Jiménez turned up the pressure a bit, hinting that it might look bad for him not to work on the Lubbock site. Keller was resolute. “Look, Karen,” he had said. “I’m 63 years old. My kids are all out of the house. I’ve relocated ten times for the company, but I plan to retire soon. I don’t want to spend the next three years burning myself out traveling all over the country. I’m staying in Wichita. If I have to, I’ll take early retirement and walk.” Although Jiménez thought he might be bluffing, she couldn’t afford to call his hand. Keller had many powerful allies in the company and was viewed as the prototypical Acme man; his latest success with the Wichita turnaround was seen as yet another in a series of impressive achievements. Jiménez knew she couldn’t afford to lose his experience and knowledge; if she couldn’t get him full time, she would do her best to pick his brain and transfer his knowledge to a project team. Keller had promised full access to his entire staff; the consultants could interview and brainstorm and strategize all they wanted. Jiménez, Peterson, and Matthews took advantage of that opportunity, but even extensive interviews with Keller and his staff hadn’t yielded any truly valuable insights. No matter how carefully Jiménez and her group tried to re-create the circumstances and techniques that had worked so well in Wichita, they made very little progress. The Lubbock employees just didn’t seem to react with the same enthusiasm as the Wichita workers had. Because no one was showing up for the problem chats—despite the “selling” of the meetings’ benefits by Jiménez, Peterson, and Matthews—attendance was made mandatory. It was true that Jiménez’s team had attempted to reduce the cycle time and “total time to investment recovery” of the project, but that goal hadn’t seemed unreasonable. Jiménez thought that there would be fewer mistakes in Lubbock and that the project would need less time and fewer resources than Wichita had. If anything, just the opposite occurred. Problems never encountered on the Wichita project created havoc at Lubbock. One particularly vexing to Jiménez was that the Lubbock workers refused to engage in any of the team-building exercises and events developed for them by the project team. The softball games that had been played with enthusiasm in Wichita were skipped by the Lubbock crowd until the project team finally offered to spring for food and beer. Even then, there was more eating than playing. I felt like I was bribing prison inmates, Jiménez remembered. Lubbock’s workers refused to engage in any of the team-building exercises developed for them. There had been some improvements. The site had begun to meet its weekly goals more consistently and had seen some reduction in operations and maintenance costs. Normally, Jiménez would have been complimented on a job well done, but in the context of what had gone before and what was expected, the improvements weren’t enough—and Jiménez knew it. She returned to her office, still without an answer. Full and generous funding had been approved for team-based productivity project by the steering committee at the personal request of Bill Daniels; this level of funding was not easily come by at Acme. How could she convince him—without looking like a failure—that the project couldn’t be rolled out with the speed and grace he envisioned? What’s more, it was clear that stalling the implementation would dull some of the project’s luster and in all likelihood jeopardize funding. She did think that the project would work, given time. But she wasn’t exactly sure how. And any waffling might get her crucified by her colleagues. The meeting with the senior managers was rapidly approaching. What could she say to them? How can Jiménez guide the project to success? Ravi Venkatesan is the managing director of Tata-Cummins, Cummins Engine Company’s joint venture with Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company in Jam Shedpur, India. His recent work has focused on the restructuring and spin-off of a number of component operations. Karen Jiménez has every reason to be worried. Although the team-based productivity project in Wichita has been successful, she clearly does not understand why. No wonder she is having so much trouble replicating the success at Lubbock. The major reason for success at Wichita was, simply, David Keller. He is clearly an effective leader with the ability to build trust and ownership, and therefore loyalty, in his staff. Jiménez was fortunate in having stumbled into him. Notice his approach. Ignoring management techniques and hoopla, he identified the single biggest performance lever—maintenance—and focused the organization on improving it. He started by listening to workers’ problems and enlisting engineering help in solving them. Over time, his understated and patient approach built trust, allowing the more formal program, SPITS, to be introduced successfully. Had he and Jiménez launched SPITS directly, it would likely have been viewed as just another management fad, and it probably would have faded away. At the Lubbock site, by contrast, without the benefit of a ringer like Keller, Jiménez has committed almost every management gaffe in the book. We are talking about people here, not lab rats or machinery. Yet Jiménez persists in using terms such as beta site and total time to investment recovery. Her search for tools and techniques is misguided. And her motives are completely selfish—she wants to look good and succeed in her career. She doesn’t appear to care about the people at the Lubbock plant at all. Jiménez’s search for tools and techniques is misguided. She doesn’t appear to care about the people in Lubbock at all. Meanwhile, Bill Daniels isn’t helping matters. With his superficial understanding of the situation, his hype-filled public proclamations, his predilection for cookie-cutter approaches, and his simplistic reliance on the latest management fads, he exemplifies the worst traits of contemporary business leaders. He is a major part of the problem and sets the tone for the rest of the operation. In fact, he is effectively goading Jiménez on to make even more mistakes than she has already. If Jiménez hopes to turn the situation around, one of her primary challenges will be to offset Daniels’s limitations. To accomplish that goal, she needs to do something she has clearly never done before: she must develop insights into how this particular organization works instead of applying textbook solutions. What are the issues at Lubbock? Who are the opinion leaders? Who is trusted? Why is morale so poor and trust so low? What are the one or two factors that drive performance? Why was Wichita successful? Are the problems at Lubbock similar to those at Wichita, or are they quite different? Keller can help her answer those questions, but Jiménez needs to spend time with him—and time at the site—to get the job done. (Despite Keller’s desire to remain in Wichita, I’m sure that he would agree to spend a limited amount of time at Lubbock if asked.) Instead of applying textbook solutions, Jiménez must develop insights into how the Lubbock plant works. Once she develops a much better understanding of the issues, Jiménez needs to educate Daniels and the rest of Acme’s senior management group. Her presentation must address the following questions: What was the situation at the Wichita plant? Why were we successful there? How is the situation at Lubbock similar? How is it different? What is the best way to proceed at the Lubbock plant? What are some general conclusions we can draw? Keller may be a valuable ally to have in the room as Jiménez goes through the presentation; being the quintessential Acme man, he clearly has credibility and clout. The two must impress upon management the need for time and for tailored approaches at each site. With luck, Daniels and the senior management group will be persuaded by their arguments. If not, it is likely that Acme’s team-based productivity project will fail. The errors of the protagonists in this case are likely to strike many readers as obvious at first blush, but they are typical of what goes on in many organizations. Teams are often either warm and fuzzy social experiments or misguided attempts to improve poor performance. Too often, leaders like Daniels encourage simpleminded approaches such as assigning everyone to a position on a team or providing generic training from a high-cost consulting firm. Meanwhile, there is no attempt to change the mind-sets and beliefs that ultimately limit the company’s performance. In those circumstances, one observes hypocrisy, a succession of short-lived programs and fads, and hierarchical control. Nothing really changes except management’s rhetoric. Clearly, what companies need is not teams but teamwork—collaborative efforts to solve the problems and improve the processes that limit an organization’s progress. That can be achieved only by giving frontline workers the motivation, information, tools, and training to solve the problems that are preventing the company from achieving its goals. The recipe for success along those lines is by now well known and reasonably simple; unfortunately, it is poorly understood and inconsistently applied: Pick a leader with the ability to build trust, ownership, and pride. Focus the organization on one compelling and competitively significant goal that every employee can relate to viscerally. Get lean. Eliminate the rotten apples. Having too many people—particularly in management and support roles—encourages the status quo. Leanness forces interdependence and encourages people to rethink routines. Getting lean also allows an organization to select the right people to move forward with—people who want to work in the organization and have the right attitudes and necessary skills. If necessary, change the rules of the game by redefining job descriptions, performance expectations, and key policies. Invert the pyramid. Focus on supporting the front line. As teams demonstrate more skill and appetite for continued improvement, progressively allow them to take on more significant decisions concerning the business. Jiménez needs to reinforce these principles in her meeting with Acme’s senior managers. She succeeded in Wichita. If she makes the necessary effort to find out why and also manages to persuade Daniels and the other senior managers that she knows what to do, she can succeed at Acme’s other sites. Lloyd Baird is executive director of the Leadership Institute at the Boston University School of Management in Boston, Massachusetts. Jiménez needs to get into a different helicopter. By taking a “shared-services” and consulting approach, she is looking at Acme’s plant problems from the wrong perspective. Focusing on rolling out the team-based productivity project with trust-building softball games, chat rooms, SPITS, and everything else that corporate executives do to their line managers in the name of performance improvement is the wrong approach. Why? The problem isn’t team building; it’s productivity, inventory control, and time to market. Teams are simply a tool—one that works in some situations but should be modified or discarded in others. Jiménez needs to stop worrying about selling her programs and start worrying about helping managers solve their problems. Forget the cute acronyms; the people in the trenches are getting a little tired of the program of the month. They want help managing the business. Jiménez needs to stop worrying about selling her programs and start worrying about helping managers. Jiménez did well in Wichita, but I believe that her success was mostly due to luck, not good management. Consider Wichita’s particulars. The first step—and the hardest—in any attempt at improvement is creating a shared need and urgency. By the time Jiménez stepped in, history had already done that at Wichita. There’s nothing like being on the chopping block to focus the mind. I’ll bet that the Wichita workers—engineers and line staff alike—were thinking, We’ve got nothing to lose, so we might as well try something. The tool Jiménez offered happened to fit the situation, but not because she understood what was going on and tailored an appropriate solution. Also, her attitude is way off base. Her own thoughts are telling: she would look “doubly good” if the project succeeded; if it failed, the situation could be positioned “with the proper spin” as an intractable set of problems. Again, that’s the wrong perspective. She should be worried about helping managers succeed, not about looking good. That’s why it’s no surprise she’s having problems at Lubbock. What she needs to do is start at the beginning. Do the Lubbock employees have a shared sense of urgency, a real desire to change? Do they collectively understand what the problems are? No. So why pick up a tool and start a program? Until Jiménez gets everybody to see a need to change, figure out what needs to be done, and commit to doing it, she should forget her tools and programs. And she should probably forget her consultants as well. They want to plug in programs and wait for the magic to happen. Lubbock just isn’t ready. Jiménez must first define the business issues, create a sense of urgency, and mobilize commitment. Then she can think about what kinds of tools and programs might work. And then she can call in her consultants. Do the Lubbock employees share a sense of urgency about the need to change? I’m not saying that Jiménez—and Lubbock—can’t benefit from Wichita’s experiences. In fact, I think that the Lubbock workers can benefit greatly by assimilating some of the lessons learned at Wichita. But Jiménez jumped the gun at both locations by implementing solutions before understanding the problems, and although she got lucky at the Wichita site, she will not be able to duplicate that success unless she changes her approach. Which brings me to Keller. It doesn’t matter if he refuses to pack up and move to Lubbock. The world is complex and fast moving; corporations can no longer rely on transferring people as a way to transfer knowledge. Keller can still go a long way toward making success at Lubbock a reality if Jiménez helps him do so. She should start by asking him, and everyone else at Wichita, five simple questions about their successes and failures: What goals were you supposed to accomplish? What actually happened? What did you learn in the process? Now what should you do? Who else needs to know what you have learned, and how are you going to tell them? Then she should enlist Keller to help explain the answers to Acme’s senior managers and to the folks at Lubbock and other sites. The payoffs will be threefold. First, if Keller is forced to be concrete, to explain what he has learned, and to make recommendations for other plants, he himself will better understand what happened at Wichita and why. As a result, his ability to maintain the plant’s success will improve. Second, because Keller is much more believable than a consultant, his impact on senior managers and workers at Lubbock will be greater. And third, if Jiménez manages to get Keller to spend even a limited time at Lubbock, his very presence will help other plants’ employees stay focused on solving the tough business problems at hand, rather than become distracted and frustrated with ineffective programs or interpersonal warfare. As for Daniels, there is no reason why he shouldn’t expect success at all the plants. There is no reason for him to back off and no reason for Jiménez to expect him to. Customers and competitors certainly won’t. But he should also spend some time figuring out how to help Jiménez think before she acts. Both need to focus on the real problems facing Acme. Martha Maznevski is a professor of management at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She researches, teaches, and consults in the area of team process and performance. Jiménez was successful in Wichita not because of the monthly chats, weekly baseball games, or Keller, but because she set up an environment conducive to attaining the results she needed. Her actions achieved two critical goals: they enabled the employees to develop cross-functional solutions, and they fostered a sense of ownership and commitment. The former led to good ideas; the latter virtually guaranteed their implementation. Unfortunately, Jiménez misunderstood what made the Wichita project successful. So rather than trying to set up circumstances conducive to developing site-specific solutions in Lubbock, she simply imported the methods that the Wichita employees had created. Before a group can achieve the synergistic performance Jiménez is looking for, it must meet three preconditions. First, team members have to approach the task at hand with the motivation to work cross-functionally and the confidence that they can produce effective solutions. In Wichita, much of the motivation came from the evident crisis in performance. Everyone in the plant knew that it was underperforming and had been earmarked as a dog, and there is no stronger motivation for action than a survival crisis. The confidence came from Keller’s presence. His long history with the company, his respect for coworkers, and his reputation as a successful problem solver almost certainly reassured employees that a turnaround could happen. Second, team members must appreciate one another’s perspectives and refrain from blaming one another for problems they may encounter. Before Jiménez’s team-based productivity project, the engineers and the operations workers at the Wichita site neither understood nor appreciated the other side’s contributions. Jiménez and Keller set up the monthly meetings to discuss problems and resolve them. That was an excellent mechanism for providing information on the different contributions and challenges of the various camps. Moreover, their active intervention during those meetings helped stop the blaming. Finally, team members must create shared views of problems and shared approaches for resolving them. Those commonalities must be acceptable to everyone if they are to provide the core for new ways of doing things. The monthly problem chats represented the beginning of the process of developing acceptable approaches. The company softball games provided a powerful way for the brains and the brawn to develop a shared picture of their plant and its goals, as well as to get to know individuals from “the other side” and to appreciate their perspectives. Those changes set the stage in Wichita so that the SPITS teams were bound to make high-quality, innovative suggestions. Implementing those suggestions successfully, though, required employees who were highly committed both to the company and to the plans. That commitment came because employees were involved in the processes. Softball succeeded in bringing the two sides together because the suggestion to play games emerged from employees’ discussions, not simply because Jiménez or another consultant believed that softball games would bring people together. It is hardly surprising that the Lubbock workers “refused to engage in any of the team-building exercises and events developed for them by the project team.” Softball brought the sides together because the suggestion to play came from the employees. What Jiménez needs to re-create at Lubbock are the conditions that will encourage employees’ commitment to and effectiveness in cross-functional teams. The actions that will create fertile ground in Lubbock are not necessarily the same ones that enriched it in Wichita. Moving Keller to Lubbock (even if he were willing), hiring outside consultants, and enforcing schemes developed in Wichita are bound to fail. Jiménez needs to discover what will motivate the people there and find a way to give them confidence in themselves. She must persevere in her efforts to help the groups understand their different contributions and develop mechanisms through which they can find common ground. But she must understand, even as she starts over at Lubbock, that nothing she does will fix Lubbock’s problems—unless the employees themselves are involved in developing the solutions. Jiménez needs to re-create the conditions conducive to developing teams. Gary Banks is the director of the Center of Technical Expertise at Monsanto Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri. He is responsible for the company’s knowledge-management architecture and its worldwide implementation of SAP software. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as Cortés burning his ships before advancing on the Aztecs, but Daniels’s commitment to Wall Street means there is no retreat from his aggressive goals. Something is going to happen at Acme. And Jiménez has the opportunity to be at the center of the action. Although Wichita was a success, Jiménez has made some serious mistakes since then. She needs to recoup quickly if she is going to be allowed to continue her work. I recommend that she take the following three actions: Give the team-based productivity project a sense of urgency. With Daniels’s mandate ringing in her ears, why is Jiménez still trying to sell this project to the rest of the senior managers? True, Acme has a history of complacency. Site and senior managers alike have ignored initiatives like team-based productivity before. But Daniels clearly wants to foster a new, engaged culture. He is expecting Jiménez to take the lead. Right now, the people at Lubbock are acting as if the whole project is optional. In order to convey how important the project is to Lubbock’s employees and Acme’s senior managers, Jiménez needs to set specific goals and delivery dates. It was fine for the Wichita plant to have an unspecified time in which to experiment. But the Lubbock workers need to know that they don’t have the same luxury. They may think that they can afford to dabble with one method or another; Wichita’s woes went on for years. They may even be resentful that Wichita’s path to success is being forced down their throats; after all, they were never as bad off to begin with. But Jiménez needs to persuade them that the clock is ticking and that if they don’t improve performance soon, the consequences will be severe. The Lubbock workers need to know that they don’t have the luxury to experiment with solutions. To do so, she needs to go back to Daniels and ask for his help. He has broadcast his support of the project publicly; now he needs to do so internally. Jiménez should sit down with Daniels and outline all her thoughts on the project; Daniels then must communicate those thoughts and his belief in the project’s importance to Acme’s staff. And each engineer, line worker, manager, and executive must understand what he or she must do in the team-based productivity project to play a part in Acme’s turnaround. Daniels must also outline and communicate the rewards for success and the consequences of failure. And Jiménez should implement tracking systems to measure and communicate results. It is possible that the Wichita methods won’t work in Lubbock. But unless the Lubbock workers understand that these attempts at change are not a game, they will not be motivated to make them work or to help Jiménez come up with better alternatives. Find ways for Acme’s employees to communicate more easily. Jiménez is using only one model, the SPITS teams. SPITS teams are ad hoc, narrowly focused, and local. There’s no real way for a Lubbock employee to learn from a Wichita mistake or success. For starters, Jiménez should try implementing cross-site and cross-functional SPITS teams. That might start the chain reaction she needs to spread Wichita’s new knowledge throughout the organization. If the company had a dynamic network, Jiménez would be able to seek alternative routes of communication. For example, the two groups at Lubbock could communicate indirectly through their counterparts at Wichita. Jiménez should try implementing cross-site and cross-functional SPITS teams. To promote communication and foster cross-site, cross-functional work groups, Jiménez should consider using an electronic tool. Programs like Lotus Notes have proven effective in bridging time, geography, and function. Electronic work groups really do seem to reduce barriers of culture, rank, and job description—something that seems a particular problem at Acme. Getting people to communicate on-line would also be one way of using valuable employees like Keller without requiring them to travel. Leverage the knowledge gained at Wichita. In their book The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1995), Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi differentiate between explicit and tacit knowledge. Generally, explicit knowledge can be written down, while tacit knowledge is expressed in experience and know-how. Jiménez needs to figure out how to capitalize on Acme’s growing bank of knowledge. The project’s explicit knowledge may be documented, but the company’s tacit knowledge exists only in the experience of Keller. And Keller is getting ready to retire and take his 39 years of experience along with him. To preserve tacit knowledge, companies must either pass it on through experience or convert it into explicit knowledge. Better communications improve social relations and thus allow tacit knowledge to transfer from one employee to another. But turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is more complex. Someone has to write the lessons down so that anyone in the organization can read and absorb them. To accomplish that, Jiménez could have her consultants shadow each of the functional groups at Wichita for a time. Then, working with members of each group, they could write up their findings. One hitch: it’s possible that Jiménez and her consultants will find that the shadow method is ineffective. They may find that Acme’s internal politics and culture are too disjointed for valuable lessons to emerge clearly. If that is the case, they should look outside Acme for best-practice models that can be adapted to Acme’s unique circumstances. For example, Jiménez might call a retiree from an industry leader—someone else’s Keller—and solicit his or her help. Many kinds of companies deal with maintenance issues, just to name one area they might focus on; there’s no reason Acme can’t learn from someone else’s experience. And an outsider won’t have Acme’s political baggage getting in the way. In fact, Jiménez might want to conduct external interviews even if the internal approach seems to work; by doing so, she can ensure that she has a broad perspective on Acme’s operation. The next few months will be tough for Jiménez. But if she enrolls her boss to focus the organization, figures out better ways to communicate, and leverages the lessons learned at Wichita, she has a chance to do something great for Acme.

The Strategy That Wouldn’t Travel

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