The Harley Davidson Story
My good friend George Morrisey, a professional consultant if there ever was one, suggested that I read the Zimmerman/Tregoe books on strategy back when I was first setting up my consulting practice. George was interested in the Tregoe explanation of Driving Force and how it applied to corporate strategy. The idea was to identify the driving force of an organization and, with it, the time frame for its application. Combine the force and a time frame into a quantifiable strategy. Critical issues were identified and planned for if there were supporting strategies that made sense.
Recently, I found the Zimmerman book in the library. It is interesting because it talks about culture and how to amplify its effects throughout the organization. My first impression of this discussion was that the strategy of spending a lot of time identifying the culture and then trying to communicate senior management's perception of values throughout the organization was just that - a strategy that took too much time to implement in this fast changing environment. That's my assumption, especially when it is amplified by Block's book on stewardship. Block, Tregoe and Zimmerman are all trying to effect positive change at an organization. Block uses management lightly, expecting them not to dictate a value system, but to open a dialog with customers and employees to deteremine what values and strategies are important to each part of the organization. No one grinds on results, because each person in the organization knows the metrics that are important to them and their individual customers and operates to them. Tregoe and Zimmerman are more analytical, spending large quantities of energy in examining the current belief system in an organization (Zimmerman, 219) and trying to effect its change to make it jive with management's point of view.
Zimmerman's team was involved in the turn-around at Harley Davidson in the early eighties. There is an entire chapter on what happened there. Basically, they realized that their bikes were over-priced and marginally shoddy, with, however, wonderful brand recognition. Their job was to fix the shoddiness and lower the price, something they were able to help the Harley team accomplish. Everyone was happy. Good story. Harley hadn't applied quality techniques yet; lean manufacturing was something that they couldn't even fathom early on. But they had craftsmen who cared about the bikes they produced. That was enough. Engaging teams of craftsmen to resolve they problems was enough to "kick-start" Harley for another twenty year run of success.
I feel like I have to say that I like the Zimmerman method better than the Block method, but I can't. I see value in both their points-of-view. Stewardship - letting the team figure things out, and do them without explicit direction - and beliefs set from above that flow throughout the organization are, in the end, be very similar. They feel different, but they're not. Interesting.
Block, Peter. Stewardship. Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 1993.
Tregoe, Benjamin B. and John W. Zimmerman. Top Management Strategy. What It Is and How to Make It Work. Quickstone. 1980.
Zimmerman, John Sr. with Benjamin B. Tregoe. The Culture of Success. Building a Sustained Competitive Advantage by Living Your Corporate Beliefs. McGraw-Hill. 1997.