Management: A majority trapped in fear of excellence

TEN YEARS after Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, their eight-point checklist for what made organisations such as IBM, Walt Disney and United Airlines the envy of the business world still looks persuasive, including as it does such concepts as 'a bias for action', 'productivity through people' and 'close to the customer'.

However, ignoring for a moment what actually happened to Peters and Waterman's paradigms, the fact must be faced that the search for the holy grail of excellence is not over.

The luxury of hindsight allows us to say now that excellence is unlikely to be delivered through the risk-management focus of the MBA approach - rationality has precious little to do with it.

Moreover, it is doubtful whether you can actually organise for excellence. What can be done is to create cultural conditions in which the striving for excellence can flourish.

When the question is put to executives in public and corporate development programmes - 'How many of you know managers who have a mortal dread of excellence in their subordinates?' - the response is overwhelmingly depressing.

There are various reasons: personal insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, the status quo is his or her comfort zone, not knowing how to harness subordinate talent and, perhaps the majority view, envy.

Peters and Waterman cite Professor Andrew Pettigrew of Warwick Business School's notion of the 'inertia of organisations' as a drag factor against the pursuit of excellence - a powerful concept and one that is contributory to the current IBM crisis, for example. But the point needs stretching. It is the inertia of individuals that managements must seek to change.

The answer to what would persuade a person to view the pursuit of excellence in a more positive light may lie in four principles:

Managers must be valued and rewarded for their ability to release the potential of their subordinates in measurable terms.

Individuals should be valued for their differences, not their orthodoxy.

Organisations must persuade managers at all levels to strive for constant self-development.

Continuous change must become the normal environment.

Managers who are trapped 'in fear of excellence' are in a majority. The reasons for this are neither obvious nor easy. But there is a start in Edward de Bono's argument that only one in 20 of the UK population is naturally oriented to think positively. These are the people whom Peters and Waterman value as the 'action minded' types.

The corollary must be that the remaining 19 have a comfort zone characterised by neutral or negative thoughts. To them, the status quo is a congenial state.

Risk management may also be a serious culprit in suppressing the search for excellence. It has been argued that the US has lost much of its former commercial drive through an excessive fondness, promoted by MBA programmes, for containing risk through strict principles of numerative analysis.

This attitude ignores the undeniable fact that the market environment in which all organisations work demands more risk-taking than ever - the pace of technology innovation, for example, makes complacency a lethal weapon.

Peters and Waterman may have had real difficulty in finding corporate exemplars of excellence, but the position is improving. Benchmarking innovations, for instance, are being made by a number of organisations in the UK - BT, BTR, Glaxo, Rank Xerox, ICI, Rentokil, Honda, Microsoft, Mori, Sony, Marks & Spencer and Prudential, to cite a sample dozen.

These innovations are based on the recognition of the value of actions that are likely to deliver a culture for excellence. They include investment in developing the coaching skills of managers at all levels so that it becomes the normal state for harnessing innovation and the search for excellence latent in subordinates, and promotion of a project management methodology and culture that develops powerful teams capable of responding to new challenges.

Tempting though it must have been for Peters and Waterman to have approached their quest from the corporate point of view, history might show that the approach would have been more successful if greater account had been taken of the human frailty of managers.

The author is marketing director at Sundridge Park Management Centre, London.

(Photograph omitted)