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When things change
The focus of what Marnell Group is all about is change – in particular, using modern visual tools to help navigate upheaval and transformation.
It comes in lots of flavors, but what really happens when ‘things change’ in an organization?
I recall the palpable change that took place inside IBM on the occasion of the announcement, in 1986, of their first quarter without a dividend. That was unheard of and as a young analyst in the HR function, I could actually feel the walls squeezing in. Almost overnight there was a deep current of change in the halls of the National Marketing Division (NMD) headquarters in Atlanta where I worked. Division leaders disappeared and were replaced. And in an amazingly short span of time (days, literally) an entire mechanism emerged to move people from headquarters locations (where they were percieved as overhead) to the field where they could be part of the revenue generation engine. [The reality was that many were expected to fail in their new assignments - an 'attrition' component not publicized in order to not have to frontally address the IBM heritage of lifetime employment - which was decidedly ending. There's another post in all of that, though.]
In the prevailing frenetic mindset project planning, systems analysis and business analysis were not at a premium as was evidenced by the hasty redeployment of lots of the marketing training staff – even as another part of the machine was gearing up to funnel large numbers of HQ-types into the marketing training program.
OOOPS!
So began what was, in the day, a major business transformation that unfolded over the next ten years including retooling bonus structures, various attempts at customer engagement and continued downsizing. Sometime around 1990, the entire administrative component of IBM went home on Friday as IBMers, and came back Monday as employess of a temp agency. That was business change, and a lot of personal transformation (the hard way). Ongoing change sees IBM recently moving its outsourcing component to … India. Imagine that.
Is there an end to business transformation? Well, consider Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), IBM’s biggest competitor in the small-to-medium business (SMB) airspace during the same reference timeframe . The owner of DEC, for his own reasons, resisted the wave of change that was America in the 80s, with some unhappy outcomes. So, I guess it’s safe to say that for DEC, reinvention and business transformation ended when DEC was purchased by Compaq and went out of business.