Built to Last

Built to Last

Defeat the early failure syndrome

William F. Johnson

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Copyright © 2018 William F. Johnson

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

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This book is dedicated to the thousands of people who have been hurt financially and emotionally by the failure and closing of businesses and other organizations to which they had become a part..

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First I want to acknowledge my wife, Rita for her love and support throughout our marriage and especially for the last year spent writing this book. We would like to thank Ron and Rebecca Bounds, and Beth Wynn for their encouragement, review, and comments which added to the book’s direction and value.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Other Books by William F Johnson

Introduction

Chapter 1 - The Birth

It starts with a Vision

What Do We Do Here?

Life Cycle

Initial Structuring

Formal Organization,

Maximum Efficiency,

Institutionalization,

Disintegration

Chapter 2 - Structure

Rationalism/Newtonian

Bureaucracy

Scientific Management

Division of Labor

Modernism

Postmodern

Relational

Chapter 3 - Culture

Values

Priorities

Practices

Chapter 4 - Chemistry

Conflict Resolution

Remedy Stage

Repositioning Stage

Rights Stage

Removal Stage

Revenge Stage

The Superior Performer

Chapter 5 - Leadership

Management Versus Leadership

Values of a Leader

Chapter 6 - Authority

External Authority

Internal Authority

Individuality

Self-confidence

Conviction/purpose/focus

Integrity

Servant Attitude

Increase Your Internal Authority

Chapter 7 - Communications

Chapter 8 - Motivation

Needs Based Motivation

Extrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic Motivation

Autonomy

Mastery

Significance

Chapter 9 - Planning

Planning for the Future

Setting Goals

Evaluating Progress

Forecasting Methodology

Historically Based:

The Dreamer Approach:

The Pessimist’s Approach:

Scientific Approach:

Growth Factors

Chapter 10 - Do You Want Change?

Changing Organizational Culture

Organizational Renewal

Disorganize or Bust

About the Author

Other Books by William F Johnson

Leading Your Ministry to Financial Health http://www.aslanpress.com/financial-leadership.html

Motivation: Your Guide to Fitting In http://www.aslanpress.com/motivation.html

Destiny: Who Am I? Why Am I Here, What Do I Do Now? http://www.aslanpress.com/destiny.html

Physician, Heal Thyself: The Oxygen Mask Principle

http://www.aslanpress.com/physician-heal-thyself.html

Pray Like Jesus

http://aslanpress.com/pray-like-jesus.html

Introduction

Within five years of a start-up, half of the companies -  begun with vision, excitement and hope - will no longer exist. Employees, customers, and other associates are left in limbo. Why and how can this be avoided?

The answer could lie in how we characterize the organizations. We get a clue from the word itself. Organizations are living organisms – they consist of real live people. Companies and organizations therefore have a natural life cycle. It begins with the excitement and enthusiasm of the day they open, on to a point of maximum efficiency, then decline and then to closing the doors.

Over the past decades we have seen the results of failed organizations and it is not pretty. The impact on the lives of the people close to them has been devastating. What is doubly tragic is that most of these failures could have been avoided if their leaders had anticipated their future and took steps to avoid the deadly causes.

This book has been written in the hope that older organizations will be transformed and renewed while new start-ups are built to last.

Earlier, I shied away from taking over existing organizations. My preferred position was to start a unit from scratch.  I had been a part of organizations in decline, and it was not pretty – watching senior management ignore the situation as they drove the organization – with its employees and customers - over the proverbial cliff. Starting from scratch, would enable me to enjoy the new birth, lead to a point of high efficiency, and then get out before things got rough.

That all changed when starting a new organization with people that had been hurt by an earlier failed start-up. At that point, I determined to learn how to transform a failing enterprise to avoid hurting people.

It doesn’t matter if a manufacturing plant closes its doors permanently, or moves to a new less expensive region. The pain of the community’s loss is huge. There are many reasons why organizations fail, - often there is not a good solution - but many can be renewed and returned to their previous glory and effectiveness, if someone has the desire to restore what has been lost.

This book provides insight into organizational dynamics in the hopes that a new understanding will lead to practical ideas and concepts that will aid in the process of renewal. We pray that plateaued and declining organizations will rediscover the things that gave the founders so much enthusiasm and hope for the future.

Take an objective look. Is your business or organization at a plateau or in decline? It is not too late for a transformation but it will probably not be easy.

William F Johnson

Chapter 1 - The Birth

It starts with a Vision

At the birth of a baby, the family gathers around. The awesome wonder is exciting. A new life has begun with its future wide open. What will this person accomplish? What will be its destiny? This is a time of anticipation, and big dreams of the future. There is a potential for greatness. But then the parents feel the burden of responsibility. They must provide the child with nurture and resources in order for it to reach its full potential. Many parents fill the child’s life with too many organized activities - sports, dancing classes, and church groups. The founder of a new company can make the same mistake. In his or her desire t become instantly profitable, they try to do too many things all at once.

If you do not have a vision of what you want your company to become, wait until you have one.

A great corporate vision requires a great imagination. Unfortunately, the past twenty years of formal business education has deemphasized imagination in favor of rational, logical decision making. Growing up without television, I would sit on the floor listening to the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, and other programs of that era. As I shut my eyes I could envision the great white stallion, Silver, and the Lone Ranger’s trusted Indian friend Tonto. When these programs came to television something was lost. No television set could equal the imagination pictured in a listener’s mind.

The state of Mississippi is often listed near the bottom in education and affluence, but it stands out above all other states in the number of creatives per capita. Authors, poets, artists and actors abound. Was there something in the water? As a foreigner, (read Yankee) living and working in that state for many years, I have come to an explanation. Because of the slower lifestyle, people have time to think. When people have time to think, they have time to have a dream, a vision and be creative.

When starting a company from scratch all you have s the vision. There are few (or no) customers. There is a lot of activity, reaching out, meeting people, and establishing products or services. This leaves time for dreaming, envisioning, thinking and soul searching.  

You start with the vision of the future, a significant purpose that will motivate your team to spend their lives for that purpose. Concerns and difficulties are subjugated by the sheer power of the vision. The rewards will be greater than the risks. Your family, employees, associates are able to foresee the significance of what they are trying to accomplish.

When tests and trials arise, the vision becomes dimmer in light of immediate problems. The exciting adventure of achieving the vision dims, even in the best of situations. Somewhere along the way, the organization itself changes. Instead of being the instrument for fulfilling the vision, it now has become a consumer of valuable resources.  Like an overindulged, spoiled child, the organization itself demands everyone’s attention. The vision is subjugated to the demands of maintaining the organization. Resources intended to serve the greater purpose are now consumed maintaining the organization.

Organizations grow into bureaucracies and become more and more demanding consuming more time and resources just to maintain their existence. The leaders, employees, or members become so consumed with keeping the organization fed that they forget the original purpose. Imagine the Borg Collective,[1] from the Star Trek television series. The Borg was an alien race that was a collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones in a hive mind called the Collective, or the hive. The fictional Borg, whose ultimate goal is achieving perfection, resembles a large organization trying to achieve ultimate institutionalization.

The organization has become institutionalized. It acts like Audrey Jr., the crossbreed of a Butterwort and a Venus Fly Trap in the movie Little Shop of Horrors.[2] As the plant keeps growing, it became more demanding, and commands its owner, Feed me Seymour!

Any organization, large or small, can fall into this trap and lose sight of the original significant purpose for which it was created. Governments, corporations, labor unions, service organizations, and religious entities are all vulnerable to losing the dream. The obvious examples of this bureaucratic process are government agencies. But, we see it in the banking industry where a bank becomes too large to fail. Some corporations grow out of control through merger and acquisition as they attempt to control a business segment.  Labor unions, which came into life to protect the workers, have become institutions and have lost sight of their original purpose. Many now exploit workers in the same way the industrial barons once did. Education systems have become large bureaucracies which must be maintained while the education level of students continues to fall. In the old one room country school, the majority of expenditures for education were spent in the classroom. Now the majority of funds are spent on maintaining a bureaucracy. The hierarchy of some charitable organizations has grown to the point where only a small fraction (as little as five percent in some well-known cases) of their income is actually spent helping people. The majority of donations feed the organizational beast. Our religious institutions are not immune to this structural obesity. Many local churches spend the majority of their energy and budgets on maintaining facilities and infrastructure. As a result little is left to feed the poor and outreach to the needs of the community they were created to serve.

While this condition is pandemic throughout the world, there are solutions that can bring renewal to these organizations. Renewal infers that there was a significant vision must be rediscovered and realized. Renewal does not refer to the achievement of the dream but to the restoration of the dream that motivated the people to continue to believe in the dream.

What has been lost can still be found, but it requires drastic action. The alternative is to continue on the path of the organization’s budgets to grow larger while providing less and less significant work.

This book is based upon real life situations and describes methods for renewing industrial, commercial and religious organizations. The same methods could be used to renew governments, but the political issues are beyond the scope of this project.

What Do We Do Here?

What do we do here? The neatly dressed, red haired administrative assistant asked smiling self-consciously. That question had been bugging her since she had been hired a month earlier and was the only employee in the office. Her question was the same thing that the new manager had been asking himself for the past three days while driving across country. He came from a comfortable home and career on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to work for an entirely unknown Washington DC company. He was to manage their new office in San Diego, California. The two thousand mile car trip gave him lots of time to think and have second thoughts about his future, and his concern for his family’s ability to adapt to the new life in a new part of the country. He located his new office suite in a strip mall off Mission Gorge Boulevard and sat in the car for several minutes before building up the courage to enter this new life. Always an optimist, he was excited buy realized the personal risks involved. The company he was to work for had been in business for less than three months. It had been started by an ex-marine who lived in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. three thousand miles away. The manager’s role - as explained by the company founder - was to run the Western Operations, but he was unsure of what those operations consisted. As he looked around the office, that realization hit home. His domain consisted of a receptionist, two desks, and a telephone. But what were they doing here?

As he hesitated to respond to his new assistant’s question, she frowned and repeated with urgency of her concern, No, really, what do we do?

She was very professional in appearance and demeanor, tall, wearing a tailored suit and her hair well-coiffed, I was beginning to worry how legitimate we were. All I do is answer the phone and pass on messages. I was beginning to question the legitimacy of this organization. 

The new manager built up all of the courage and confidence that he could muster and responded, "I’m not sure what we do here. But we are going to find out together