How to start culture change...culture changes are much more complicated than they seem. Why? It’s simple: a culture is pervasive. It’s in every nook and cranny of an organization, and it has deep roots. It got the way it is over time, and (this is important) for legitimate reasons.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” By Alec Pendleton, Big Ideas for Small Companies I grew up in a family manufacturing business, which my father had built from nothing over years of assembling the right management team, acquiring compatible companies, and steadily improving operations. By the time I arrived on the scene, there were about a dozen plants and almost 1,000 employees, and the company was well respected in its various markets. And after fifty years of high [...]
By Alec Pendleton, Big Ideas for Small Companies Consider the modern automobile. From the moment an idea is hatched until the finished product is delivered to a buyer, the process is kind of a miracle. There are, I’m told, about 25,000 parts in a typical car, and every one of them had to go through basically the same process: someone had an idea, and that led to developing specifications, which led to design, then to manufacture, to assembly, to delivery. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, the process can take several years, and at every step along the [...]
By Alec Pendleton Are you facing a hard decision in your business today? Let’s face it, the answer to that is usually “yes”. On any given day, there’s typically something that’s gnawing away at you, something you’re struggling with. To me, the first question to ask is simple: whether or not the decision is really “hard”. That may sound like a silly question, but really, it’s not. The question is whether the decision is hard, or just unpleasant. Over many years, I’ve spent a lot of time building up my ulcers, agonizing over some decision or other. Now, looking [...]
