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Eapen thomas

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Operations Research Management Science - The Sense-and-Respond Enterprise

  • Haeckel used Ackoff's definition of systems and explication of how they work as the foundation for a set of principles for adaptive enterprise design. Haeckel argues that businesses and organizations should be designed and managed as systems, as opposed to, for example, hierarchical structures of authority linked by cross-enterprise processes. In his studies regarding future business trends in a global marketplace, Haeckel recognized that adaptiveness — which is appropriate response to change — is a more difficult challenge than flexibility, agility or rapid responsiveness to the customer.
  • "Unpredictable, discontinuous change is an unavoidable consequence of doing business in the Information Age. Because this intense turbulence demands fast — even instantaneous — response, many large companies are fragmenting themselves into smaller, quick-response units. But in doing so, they relinquish important advantages of scale and scope. Is it possible to have it both ways? Can large, complex firms adapt successfully and systematically to unexpected change? Yes, says Steve Haeckel, but only if leaders learn how to manage their organizations as adaptive systems.

TIP | British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry | Report | Account of Ship's Journey across the Atlantic/Messages Received/Disaster - Action that Should Have been Taken

  • And there was certainly no reduction of speed. Why, then, did the Master persevere in his course and maintain his speed? The answer is to be found in the evidence. It was shown that for many years past, indeed, for a quarter of a century or more, the practice of liners using this track when in the vicinity of ice at night had been
    in clear weather to keep the course, to maintain the speed and to trust to a sharp look-out to enable them to avoid the danger. This practice, it was said, had been justified by experience, no casualties having resulted from it. I accept the evidence as to the practice and as to the immunity from casualties which is said to have accompanied it. But the event has proved the practice to be bad. Its root is probably to be found in competition and in the desire of the public for quick passages rather than in the judgment of navigators. But unfortunately experience appeared to justify it.
  • The evidence shows that he was not trying to make any record passage or indeed any exceptionally quick passage. He was not trying to please anybody, but was exercising his own discretion in the way he thought best. He made a mistake, a very grievous mistake, but one in which, in face of the practice and of past experience, negligence cannot he said to have had any part; and in the absence of negligence it is, in my opinion, impossible to fix Captain Smith with blame.
05 Dec 09

No More Executive Bonuses! - Business Insight - Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan - MIT Sloan Management Review

  • This may sound extreme. But when you look at the way the compensation game is played—and the assumptions that are made by those who want to reform it—you can come to no other conclusion. The system simply can’t be fixed. Executive bonuses—especially in the form of stock and option grants—represent the most prominent form of legal corruption that has been undermining our large corporations and bringing down the global economy. Get rid of them and we will all be better off for it.

  • A company’s health is represented by its financial measures alone—even better, by just the price of its stock.


    Come on. Companies are a lot more complicated than that. Their health is significantly represented by what accountants call goodwill, which in its basic sense means a company’s intrinsic value beyond its tangible assets: the quality of its brands, its overall reputation in the marketplace, the depth of its culture, the commitment of its people, and so on.



    Journal Video



    If not bonuses, then what? How can companies compensate CEOs fairly? Henry Mintzberg speaks with the Journal’s Erin White.



    But how to measure such things? Accountants have always had trouble when they have tried, as have stock-market analysts, investors and even potential purchasers of the company. (That’s one of the reasons so many mergers fail.) No board of directors is going to have much luck finding that elusive measure, either.


    This flawed assumption, though, does far more damage than simply distorting CEO compensation. All too often, financial measures are a convenient substitute used by disconnected executives who don’t know what else to do—including how to manage more deeply.

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Project Syndicate - The Cycles of Economic Discontent

"The response to the economic crisis in Thailand and Korea in the late 1990's was emphatic preaching about the inherent superiority of the so-called Anglo-Saxon economic model. But this vision, in turn, also became problematic, and it was unambiguously discredited in 2007-2008, amid a massive outbreak of European and Asian Schadenfreude ."

www.project-syndicate.org/...English - Preview

Economics

  • FLORENCE – The nineteenth century was mesmerized by the cyclical behavior of business. The French economist Clement Juglar became famous for establishing that business cycles ran for around nine or ten years. We have recently had our own cycles of exuberance and disintegration. But they are very different.
  • The next beautiful idea that failed, in 1997-1998, was the concept of a particular “Asian miracle” (as it had been dubbed in the title of an influential World Bank publication). Asian economies were supposedly better coordinated because of strategic interventions by the government along the lines of the initial postwar practices of Japan’s MITI. But, like the Soviet Union and its satellites, the smaller and dynamic Asian economies had taken on too much debt.
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The Financial Services Club's Blog: The Hills are alive with Britain's newest Bank

  • We hire our staff on one thing as well. And it’s not their banking
    experience. We hire them if they smile through their first interview.
    Hire for smiles. You can get anyone to work, but you cannot get them
    engaged if they’re not customer friendly in the first place.



    Our branch managers are also seen to be business people. Each one of
    them is running a business. They are empowered to deliver our brand
    promise, therefore they must be able to deliver it.



    By way of example, 90% of customer complaints are about $112 in fees on
    average, so we waive it. I would rather give the customers $112 as it
    means that I keep them, and the average customer is worth about $3,000
    a year so to waive the fees is no big issue

AGILE TO ADAPTIVE

  • In his book, Adaptive Enterprises: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond

    Organizations, Stephan Haeckel argues that it has become almost impossible to

    predict and plan in advance for customer problems and opportunities, especially

    with information-based products and services. Haeckel states that successful

    organizations must, instead, become adaptive; to learn how to continuously

    identify and understand these problems or opportunities as they occur and respond

    to them quickly and appropriately, customer by customer. Successful adoption of

    this adaptive mode of operation, he suggests, requires that an organization install

    the capabilities and management context of what he calls the Adaptive Loop,

    which shows the flow between the Sensing system, of sense and interpretation,

    into the Response system, of deciding, and acting. It enables people on the line

    to continuously receive information from customers, understand what it means,

    decide on and take appropriate action and, then, repeat the
  • In their books, both Haeckel and Pfeffer and Sutton point out that achieving

    organizational adaptability and agility usually requires a substantial change in the

    culture of an organization and its people, moving from an analyze-plan-deploy at

    the center-of-the-enterprise model to a see-know-commit-act at the edge-of-the-

    enterprise basis and changing its orientation from company-out to customer-back
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