White Paper on Organizational Productivity

A White Paper on Productivity and High Performance

At Changing the Focus we work to create high performance models within traditional organizational structures to improve conventional returns on ROI and ROA. With our holistic approach to training and coaching we work to change the way management and staff think, plan, and communicate their goals and expectations. We deliver programs that are the genesis of change and continue to reinforce learning; assuring lessons learned become habits gained. In today’s organizational mindset two distinct business models exist.

The Traditional Model

The model that has dominated most modern business has been based on a set of principles and practices formally codified by Frederick Taylor in 1903. Taylor’s model is known as "scientific management". The principles of scientific management were very useful over 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 and scope of work. Divide labor to keep different functions separate. Define the one best way to do a job. Uniform and strictly enforced policies. Management's role to control the means and speed of work.

While this paradigm was useful in moving us to an industrial society, it does not fit with today’s complex and changing nature of the economy, market place, technologies...