Bulldozer00's Blog

It’s always fun to watch the initial stages of euphoria emerge and then disappear when a corpo-wide initiative that’s intended to improve performance is attempted. The anointed “design” team, which is almost always filled exclusively with managers and overhead personnel who conveniently won’t have to implement the behavioral changes that they poop out of the initiative themselves, starts out full of energy and bright ideas on how to solve the performance problem. After the kickoff, a resource-burning flurry of activity ensues, with meeting after meeting, discussion after discussion, and action item after action item being tossed left and right. When the money’s gone, the time’s gone, and the smoke clears, business returns to the same old, same old.

As a hypothetical example, assume that an initiative to institute a metrics program throughout the org has been mandated from the heavens. At best, after spending a ton of money and time working on the issue, the anointed design team generates a long list of complicated metrics that “someone else” is required to collect, analyze, and act upon. The team then declares victory and self-congratulatory pats on the back abound. At worst, the team debates the issue for a few meetings, conveniently forgets it, and then moves on to some other initiative – hoping that no one notices the useless camouflage that they left in their wake. Bummer.