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Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness PDF

355 Pages·2006·1.31 MB·English
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Preview Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness

ffirs.qxd 12/9/05 2:12 PM Page i BBuuiilltt ttoo CChhaannggee How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness Edward E. Lawler III Christopher G. Worley foreword by Jerry Porras ffirs.qxd 12/9/05 2:12 PM Page i ffirs.qxd 12/9/05 2:12 PM Page i BBuuiilltt ttoo CChhaannggee How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness Edward E. Lawler III Christopher G. Worley foreword by Jerry Porras ffirs.qxd 12/9/05 2:12 PM Page ii Copyright © 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or war- ranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representa- tives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appro- priate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, conse- quential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002. Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lawler, Edward E. Built to change : how to achieve sustained organizational effectiveness / by Edward E. Lawler III, Christopher G. Worley ; foreword by Jerry Porras.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-8061-0 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-7879-8061-7 (cloth) 1. Organizational change. 2. Organizational effectiveness. I. Worley, Christopher G. II. Title. HD58.8.L379 2006 658.4'06—dc22 2005031021 Printed in the United States of America FIRSTEDITION HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ftoc.qxd 12/9/05 2:13 PM Page iii Contents Foreword by Jerry Porras v Preface xiii Chapter 1 Why Build Organizations to Change 1 Chapter 2 A Dynamic View of 23 Organizational Effectiveness Chapter 3 Strategizing 54 Chapter 4 Structuring for Effectiveness and Change 88 Chapter 5 Developing the Right Information, 118 Measurement, and Decision-Making Pro cesses Chapter 6 Acquiring the Right Talent 153 Chapter 7 Managing Human Capital 179 Chapter 8 Meeting the Leadership Challenge 213 Chapter 9 Designing Reward Systems 236 Chapter 10 Rewarding Performance and Change 256 Chapter 11 Creating a Built-to-Change Organization 283 iii ftoc.qxd 12/9/05 2:13 PM Page iv IV | Contents Notes 313 Acknowledgments 319 About the Authors 321 Index 323 fbetw.qxd 12/9/05 2:20 PM Page v Foreword During the past decade, scandals at Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and others brought into sharp relief difficulties in governing organizations in a world fraught with unbounded greed and abundant opportunity to satisfy it. Driven by technological innovation, new industries sprouted with few rules or norms to guide the behavior of their leaders. As we face the next decade, organizations will become even more global, with flatter hier- archies, faster information flows, and increased interdepend- ence. New competitors from exploding economies such as China and India will change the economic landscape, causing some U.S. industries to fight for their lives while others face limitless opportunity. What migh t organizations do differently to respond more quickly and effectively to this increasingly chaotic environment? What might leaders do differently to build their organizations for change? I will explore two themes as the basis for dealing with these questions. First, leaders must understand their organization’s values, and work to shape them in such a way that those values guide and sustain needed changes rather than undermine them. Second, leaders must architect their organizations to embrace V fbetw.qxd 12/9/05 2:20 PM Page vi VI | Foreword rather than resist change. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and I found that the enduringly great (visionary) companies we stud- ied held a small set—between three and five—of values so fun- damental and long-lasting that they could be thought of as core. These core values helped to guide behavior in the company over the very long term and kept it from engaging in practices detrimental to its essence. As such, core values can play a pos- itive role in change by defining what’s “in play” and what’s not, that is, change everything in the organization except the core values. Ed Lawler and Chris Worley agree, and use the concept of identity to recognize the importance of stability. The notion of values is a tricky one, especially when we think about the ways values become imbedded in an organiza- tion or, more important, changed. Increasingly, leaders attempt to define new values for their organizations and then go about “selling” them to employees, only to find out that the selling doesn’t always work as well as expected. Often, the breakdown occurs when leaders attempt to convince their employees to accept and internalize the new values as core. I don’t think any- one can convince adults to adopt a core value not previously held. Core values exist deep in a person’s belief system and gen- erally develop a s a result of early childhood experiences and learning. Once embraced, changing them just doesn’t happen. Here, too, Lawler and Worley agree, and build their change- able organization approach around the idea of stability. So, what are leaders to do? Well, first and most obvious, leaders must seek to discover those values truly core for the organization. Unfortunately, in my experience, few organiza- tions succeed in this search because the vast majority of them don’t have core values. For a value to be core it must pass three tests: it should (1) have existed in the organization since its ear- fbetw.qxd 12/9/05 2:20 PM Page vii Foreword | VII liest days; (2) still be around 100 years from now; and (3) have evidence of events in which the organization lived the value and paid some cost or suffered in some meaningful way for doing so. Most organizational values come and go as CEOs change or strategies change, or fall by the wayside when a significant ben- efit can be gained by ignoring them. Bottom line, all organiza- tions have values, but few have any that meet the corestandard. So, if no core values exist for the organization, an alterna- tive for a leader is to identify a set of values that the organiza- tion aspires to make core. (Important to note: when communicated, these values must be clearly labeled as aspira- tional. Failing to refer to them as such risks cynical reactions from organization members who may well possess numerous examples of their leaders not living them.) As aspirational, these values provide a future to strive for, and hopefully, in ten to twenty years, the organization can provide concrete evi- dence of actually having lived them. People won’t follow lead- ers who espouse core values but don’t live them. More likely, they will follow leaders who aspire to live a new set of values they wish to make core and who want to be held accountable when they don’t. Once identif ied, core or aspirational core values must guide hiring and firing decisions (“If you fit, join us!” “If you don’t fit, leave.”), reward and promotion decisions, and generally the architecture of the organization. I’ll speak more about this point later, but for now, let’s turn to a second recommendation on how leaders can use values to enhance the organization’s abil- ity to effectively change. Leaders must understand the difference between core val- ues and all the other values floating around in an organization. Not all organizational values are core or aspirationally core, and

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In this groundbreaking book, organizational effectiveness experts Edward Lawler and Christopher Worley show how organizations can be “built to change” so they can last and succeed in today’s global economy. Instead of striving to create a highly reliable Swiss watch that consistently produces
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.