Making The System Hum

Introduction:

Leadership sets a company's vision and values. Customers indicate what to focus on. Strategic planning converts vision, values, and customer re-quirements into company goals. And the system stands ready to pursue those goals. But first the goals must be translated into requirements that rivet the attention of all employees.

Methods to make the systems:

The primary methods our role models use to make their systems hum are:

1. Set challenging goals.
2. Develop action plans to pursue those goals.
3. Train people to achieve the goals.

Ritz-Carlton: Striving for "Gold Standards":

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company transîates customer requirements into employee requirements through its Gold Standards and its strategic plan-ning process.

The company's motto is: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen," and its three steps of service are:

1. A vvarm and sincere greeting. Use the guest's name, if and when possible.

2. Anticipation of and compliance with guests' needs.

3. Fond farewell. Give them a vvarm good-bye and use their names, if and when possible.

Motorola has produced results. From 1987 to 1996, its cumulative savings from quality improvement was $11 billion. Över the same period, sales increased 4.75 times and sales per employee tripled, while the num-ber of employees increased just 46 percent. This translates into an aver-age increase in employee productivity of 12.3 percent per year.

To achieve these goals, Motorola changed its system. Keki Bhote, se-nior corporate consultant on quality and productivity for Motorola, listed the changes in an article in National Productivity Revieto:

• Reducing the number of managerial and supervisory layers, and in-creasing the spans of control.
• Organizing to a more manageable size to buîld teamwork and give employees a greater sense of control.
• Integrating related functions to break down artificial departmental walls and overcome the "vertical silo" syndrome.
• Changing the organization's traditional role of policing to that of coaching.
• Enhancing every Standard, expectation, process, and system in a fevv businesses that have now become the models for others to follovv.
• Making quality the first order of attention on meeting agendas, re-vievvs, plans, compensation, and rewards.

Through clearly defined goals, Motorola focuses the efforts of its man-agers, supervisors, and other employees on five initiativesthat capture the company's customer focus and quality values:

1.  Six-Sigma quality. 

2. Total cycle time reduction.

3. Product, manufacturing, and environmental leadership.

4. Profit improvement

5.Empowerment for ali in a participative, cooperative, and creative vvorkplace.