HARD LESSONS OF ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT (OD) NEVER LEARNED!

HARD LESSONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) NEVER LEARNED!

DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 28, 2008


“The Tampa Bay area lost another corporate headquarters when shareholders of St. Petersburg and London-based DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS voted Friday to approve $240 million sale of the office equipment and service company of KONICA MINOLTA BUSINESS SOLUTIONS USA of Ramsey, N.J. The proposed sale was announced in April. Danka, which got its start locally here in 1977, saw its financial fortunes begin to plummet after the $588 million acquisition of an EASTMAN KODAK copier division in 1996 and subsequent difficulties blending the corporate cultures and technological infrastructures.”

Business Section, The Tampa Tribune – June 28, 2008

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It is interesting to note that in the same business section of the Tampa Tribune there is a tribute to Bill Gates and his gang of innovators who started Microsoft in 1978, creating several billionaires, among whom Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and literally hundreds and hundreds of millionaires.

Bill Gates is stepping down from day-to-day operations to devote his full time to his philanthropic enterprises. Pictured in this issue is the rag tag group of long hairs and scrubby looks of nine men and two women, who made Microsoft one of the most imposing companies in the world thirty years later.

This unimpressive fledgling group of college dropouts and counterculture sympathizers, a group few took seriously, were actually a dedicated collection of hard working doers. They did so without thinking about culture or infrastructure or any popular theme of today that gets so much press. Their eyes were on a single ball, putting their software into every home in the world.

In the process, however, this eclectic group was developing a culture, creating an infrastructure, developing a value system, and evolving a work ethic that would manifest itself exponentially into one of the most successful enterprise systems ever known to man.

They didn’t worry about salary, perks, fringe benefits, selective parking, recognition for hours worked, or having corner offices signifying clout. They had neither time for award ceremonies, pep rallies or motivating meetings nor for complex policies and procedures, high talent demographics or performance appraisals. They had time only for focusing on meaningful results. They were eleven people with a singular attitude.

They came together when project points had to be checked. They did so spontaneously and expeditiously, and then moved on. No one had time to develop slogans about “team work” or the “power of teaming,” or “empowerment.” Slogans were for advertisers who designed products for people to want what they didn’t necessarily need. Not so with them. They were in to making people’s lives easier by finding easier ways in the conduct of life with software.

The bureaucracy that developed was lean and mean, direct and confrontational, and off the cuff but never off the project shelf. There were no expensive brochures to entice people to want their products; no enticing brochures to bring talent to their door. It was all word of mouth in those early days.

In a strange way, it harkened back to the pre-industrial days of the European guilds as enterprise was conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Everyone in those days was a generalist and brought his or her talent to the needs of the project as it unfolded. It could be anything from household goods to farm equipment to luxury items.

DANKA’S DOWNFALL

As the newspaper item quotes, Danka is still sliding down the slope of entropy. It got too big too fast with too much that wasn’t Danka at all.

Eastman Kodak is not the only acquisition that Danka acquired in its attempt to be a main player in its industry, but it was the most damaging acquisition. Danka was a small company that acquired this copier division, a company stuck in a time warp with excessive perks, benefits, requirements, rituals, rites of passage, and hubris that looked back to an age long since passed.

Danka, like early Microsoft, was lean and mean and on target. The company assumed its collective enthusiasm and determination to be a major player would be contagious for any operation that joined its ranks. Danka had little patience with Kodak protocol, or its pomp and circumstance, and even less appetite for its demands.

Danka found the pay structure of salesmen, the benefit package, and other perks such as vacation and sick leave policies excessive to the extreme. Eastman Kodak people were now Danka people and they had better get used to the idea. WRONG!

It takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to change that habit. Imagine sales people with Kodak, say for twenty years, being asked to bite the bullet now for scaled down perks and benefits in the future. Not likely. Imagine those same people thinking themselves superior because they come from an established hundred-year-old company to this fledgling upstart, and you have a sense of how things might rupture into dismay.

The Kodak people were suspended in permanent adolescence, taken care of by their caregivers, management, and as such were looking for what they could get, not give.

Granted, these workers were typical of workers in mega corporations across America, and the backbone of a society that ceased to exist by 1968, which marked the end of the American Century.

Such workers lived in the nostalgia of WWII when the world was desecrated and had no choice but to “buy American.” It took until 1968 for the rest of the world to catch up, and the young people of Microsoft and Danka were part of that new cadre of workers.

THE IMPORANCE OF OD AND HOW IT COULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE

I am going to get personal now. I am an old codger no longer in the thick of things, but happen to be one of the pioneers of one of the most critical disciplines around today, a discipline that is rarely understood, and more rarely practiced, as it should be by professionals of the discipline.

OD is not personnel! OD is not human resources management! OD is the high priest of the new frontier of human endeavor!

I make no apologies for italics. If I could use an analogy, the OD professional is a combination police officer and priest. He is there to “serve and protect” the company from everyone, including its management; and there to see that the ethics of operations and the practices of employment are humanistic, sensible, fair, and consistent.

The purpose of an organization is what it does, and what it does should be mutually beneficial to workers, managers, and customers alike, and so in the best interests of the markets the company serves.

OD is diligence to see that management doesn’t exploit workers to its benefit, or for workers to exploit the company at its detriment. .

OD’s client is not management; nor is its client the workers. OD’s client is the company.

OD is the social, industrial and organizational psychologist of the company. It assesses the company’s social psychological health in the same manner the clinical psychologist assesses the psychological health of the individual.

OD is essentially an unobtrusive observer of behavior at all levels and in all circumstances.

OD’s many instruments to devise this perspective, aside from observation, include individual interviews, demographic surveys, personality surveys, assessment centers, value-clarification interventions, conflict management, and attitudinal surveys.

OD should also be party to corporate board meetings, executive meetings, and worker meetings. In a word, observing all parties as they relate to the purpose of the company being what it does, not what it says it does, or what it wishes that it could do, or what it hopes to do in the future, but what it is doing now!

OD is not the friend of management or of the worker. OD is not the friend of the company. OD is the conscience of all.

THE BOTTOM LINE
The moment that contingencies of an organization change; the moment that it feels it must take the short cut and acquire this or that operation to give it a fuller capability, IT CHANGES!

That is the same for Microsoft as it motors into the future, as it has been unhappily for Danka in the past.

When in transition and in the midst of transformation, an OD professional on board with clout is worth his or her price in diamonds several times over. Company management has yet to realize this because it thinks common sense is common, and OD is all about common sense, and it knows as much about it as anyone. Repeated company failures involved in mergers have failed to dent this perception.

That said the OD professional could help the company bridge the gap between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, wherever the company might be in that equation.

OD is the mathematical equivalent of E = MC2, only it deals in human combustibles. I say that because it takes the collective nascent energy of a company, and gives it a release pattern that soars instead of self-implodes as Danka has. Culture is the key to everything, and culture is OD's domain.

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Dr. Fisher has written several books and hundreds of articles on this subject, most recently A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). See his website: www.fisherofideas.com for more information.