One Day You’re Indispensable, the Next Day… : Business System Issues and Resolution

The New York Times article “One Day You’re Indispensable, the Next Day…” discussed the departure of Steven Jobs from Apple and other significant organizational contributor. The article discussed how moments in history, or institutions, that are so shaped by the extraordinary contributions of a single person that it is hard to imagine one without the other. The article describes how the indispensable-man debate was fueled anew last week when Steven P. Jobs said he was taking a leave of absence from Apple until July because his health problems were “more complicated” than he first thought.

Organizations can be very successful when they have a superman or superwoman who leads the charge; however, they can at the same time be very vunerable; i.e., succeptable to poorer performance when that person is no longer the leader.

Jim Collins in the book “Good to Great” talks about a level five leader being not only a great when there are the leader but also the organization maintains greatness when they are no longer affilitated with the organization. This does not often occur. What happens more often than not is that these organizations do not do as well after the super-strong leader leaves.

Organizations should to work toward creating a long-lasting enterprise business governance system that is not so dependent on whoever is the leader. This can occur when there is a change in the business system model so that policies are created/executed and there is a no-nonsense blending of scorecards, strategic planning, business improvement, and control. With this system strategies are created with a blending of analytics and innovation and not just created from a brilliant leader who has seemingly inate superpowers ability to direct the organization to always, as it seems, make the best decisions.

Such a system is the Intergrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE). IEE provides a system on how going beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard tool set can help organizations create a 21st Century Business Management Governance System that addresses many of the financial crisis issues of the day. This article can be downloaded from item #1 in the link below.

Link: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) Business Governance System: Understanding its Framework, Benefits, and Why it is more than just TQM, Lean Six Sigma, TOC, etc.

An MSNBC article also links to this American Management Association article and video that describes the IEE system.

Forrest Breyfogle
Forrest@SmarterSolutions.com

There are over 100 downloadable articles on this topic and more available at on-line resource library .