Practicing High Performance

How Mosaic Business Solutions Helps Businesses Reach Their Full Potential

Business Strategy White Paper - Page 2

The Traditional Paradigm

The model that has dominated most modern businesses has been based on a set of principles and practices formally defined by Frederick Taylor in 1903 and known as "scientific management". The principles of scientific management were very useful a century ago when this country was moving from a rural society in which people were self employed, produced their own food, made their own clothes, and educated themselves to an urban society based on mass production and interdependence.  With these changes in the structure of society and the way in which work was organized, it was necessary to create bureaucratic organizations to manage and control masses of untrained people.  Taylor believed that work could best be accomplished by breaking it down into simple and repetitive tasks for workers and that management's job was to control the means and speed of production.  Some major features of job design that came out of the industrial revolution are the following:

• Simple, narrowly defined jobs.
• Division of labor that keeps different functions separate.
• One best way to do a job.
• Uniform and strictly enforced policies.
• Management's role to control the means and speed of work.

Although this paradigm may have been useful in moving us to an industrial society, it does not fit with the complex and changing nature of the economy, market place, technologies and people today.  It is seriously flawed in two primary ways. 

First, traditional organizations are structured around functions, e.g. engineering, manufacturing, sales, etc. in a manufacturing company or customer service, accounting, billing, etc. in a service company.  The problem this creates is that work is fragmented in such a way that people do not see or feel responsibility for a "whole process".  They over identify with their own jobs and fail to understand or care about the overall good of the company or customers they serve.  This leads to poor communication, redundancies of effort, turf battles, delays in decision-making, and general inefficiency.  It is most noticeable when a piece of work is completed and "thrown over the wall" to another department to be forgotten.  Or, when an urgent decision that directly impacts a customer is delayed for a couple of days because it needs someone else's signature.  Or, when work is inspected after it has been built.  The former Soviet Union was the paragon of inefficiency and bureaucracy.  It took five years for the government to approve construction of the first McDonald’s restaurant.  And to change a single ingredient in ketchup took numerous levels of government approval.

A second flaw of the traditional paradigm is the assumption that it is management’s job to control the work of employees.  Management sets goals, makes decisions, measures progress, evaluates performance, etc.  Managers are the thinkers and planners, and employees are the doers.  These organizations fail to tap the tremendous intelligence and creativity of their people.  Power exists at the top and people on the "front lines" and closest to the core process of the business have less authority to make decisions, solve problems or significantly contribute to the mission or goals of the organization.  Most people do routine, repetitive and somewhat unchallenging jobs without much sense that they really make a difference in the overall direction or success of the business.  This results in organizations that are bureaucratic, rigid, unconcerned about quality, lacking innovation, unresponsive to customer needs and generally unsatisfying places of employment.  Unfortunately, in spite of such limitations, the traditional paradigm continues to dominate the practices of most businesses throughout this country today.

Continued on page 3, The High Performance Paradigm--->

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