The Shft In Thinking-employee Focus

Introduction:

In the new management model, employees make the system ıvork. They interact with customers, translate customers' requirements into products and services, manage and improve processes, work with suppliers, determine and use measurements, compare their processes to others, contribute to their communities, and perform all the other tasks that turn a building filled with equipment into a successful business.

The new scenario:

• New technologies and new institutions are combining to substantially alter these four traditional sources of competitive advantage.

• Natural resources essentially drop out of the competitive equation.

• Being born rich becomes much less of an advantage than it used to be. Technology gets turned upside down.

• New product technologies become secondary; new process tech­nologies become primary.

• And the new process technologies depend on people who are empowered, trained, recognized—and satisfied with their work.

• The shift in thinking in this area is as dramatic as any required by the new management model.

• Management must serve the workforce, in the sense that it must help people learn, grow, contribute, and excel.

• More than 20 years ago, Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay called "The Servant as Leader." A line from that essay captures the new management model's employee focus:

• The business exists as much to provide meaningful work to the person as it exists to provide a product or service to the customer.