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Getting Rid of the Bureaucracy |
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by Vadim Kotelnikov & Ten3 East-West
"It is as unfair to slowly dismantle a bureaucratic structure as it would be for a surgeon to open up a patient once a year and remove 10% of a cancerous tumor."1
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Learning from Fastest Companies No organization with a large bureaucracy is able to make fast decisions. Getting rid of the bureaucracy is a law at fastest companies, and anyone found guilty of building or perpetuating bureaucracies is severely punished for management malpractice. "The more dead weight at the top of the organization involved in the decision-making process, the slower the decisions will be made".1 Case Study: General Electric Jack Welch has always hated and fought bureaucracy. "To him, bureaucracy is the enemy. Bureaucracy means waste, slow decision making, unnecessary approvals, and all the other things that kill a company's competitive spirit. He spent many years battling bureaucracy, trying to rid GE of anything that would make it less competitive."4 He didn't simply strip away a little bureaucracy. He reshaped the face of the company to rid it of anything that was getting in the way of being informal, of being fast, of being boundaryless. Welch felt that ridding the company of wasteful bureaucracy was everyone's job. He urged all his employees to fight it. "Disdaining bureaucracy" became an important part of GE's shared values, the list of behaviors that were expected from all GE employees...More Case in Point: Cutting Long Meetings Short A CEO hired Larry Farrel, a renowned management consultant, to help him to get rid of the corporate bureaucracy. In particular, the CEO complained about the length of corporate meetings - the discussions were poorly focused and too long. Larry suggested a very simple but a very effective solution: to remove chairs from the meeting room. The CEO was extremely satisfied with the results: decisions were taken now within three minutes instead of three hours. Case in Point: ASEA Brown Bovery When Sweden's Percy Barnevik's company merged with the troubled Swiss giant Brown Bovery, he promptly sent a message to the thousands of bureaucrats who worked at the company's headquarters in Zurich: "In the future,... the company won't be run like a government and administered from a central home office. Everyone at head office has ninety days to find a real job within the company that has something to do with the customer". Ninety days later Barnevik made good on his promise. More than 3,000 bureaucrats who were unable to comply were laid off. As a result of this shake-off, the once stodgy company - where decisions took months - quickly transformed itself into a quick-thinking company where all decisions are made in 1,000 local offices by 170,000 associates and employees. "The new ASEA Brown Bovery has sizzled, going from one strength to another and currently earning profits in excess of $2.5 billion annually1".
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Bibliography:
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"It's Not the Big that Eat the Small... It's the Fast that Eat the Slow", Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, 2000
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"The Cycle of Leadership", Noel M. Tichy with Nancy Cardwell, 2002
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"Jack Welch and the GE Way", Robert Slater, 1999
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"The Welch Way", Jeffrey A. Krames, 2002
