The document discusses the challenges organizations face when trying to implement change, often mistakenly attributing failures to their workforce rather than processes or management issues. It illustrates how the Matsushita company turned around its fortunes by directly engaging employees with customers during tough economic times. The Change Consultancy offers a new tool, Tribe 365, to help organizations assess and implement effective change strategies in real time.

1. What’s Your Burning Platform?
The Change Consultancy
https://thechangeconsultancy.co

2. “We have to change – where do we start?”. Does this sound familiar?
Many organisations look at their poor results, or see what their competitors
are doing, and assume that the fault is with their workforce. It’s easy to go down
the conventional route – costs across all departments by a certain percentage or
buy a new product, but the majority of times that people have done this, they end
up worse than they were before. Successful organisations shout their success
from the rooftops. Failed organisations go under, or keep very quiet about it.
Success and failure, when following the crowd, can seem to strike at random.
https://thechangeconsultancy.co

3. Is it your staff? Or your management?
Costs can get too high due to many different factors. Yes, employees and
salaries are one of the highest costs in service companies. But poor processes,
lack of clarity, duplication of work, and lack of automation can all mean that good
staff are less efficient and cost more than they should.
Before embarking on a huge and expensive change programme, it’s worth
getting an in-depth understanding of how your organisation thinks:
https://thechangeconsultancy.co
❏ Does the organisation share a mission and a vision, or is that just a
boardroom fantasy?
❏ Who’s working to help the company succeed, and who is working to prevent
it succeeding?

4. ❏ Do they all think they’re working to help the company succeed? Is there
confusion?
❏ Do you know how to show everyone whether you are succeeding or failing,
on a week by week, or month by month basis?
https://thechangeconsultancy.co
Japan was heavily penalised following the Second World War. The country
was required to pay huge war reparations, which meant that nobody in Japan had
money to buy goods, and no other country was buying their exports. The work
culture was of a ‘job for life’, but companies simply couldn’t afford to keep their
workers, and in company after company, workers were being called together by
their directors and advised of layoffs.

5. Matsushita was also suffering.
Kōnosuke Matsushita called together his
employees, and they feared the worst.
He was honest – announced that there
were not enough customers to keep the
production lines running at full speed.
However, his solution was revolutionary:
every member of the production staff
was sent out to customers and potential
customers to sell the products. Within
months, production lines for back up to
full speed because of the increased
sales.
https://thechangeconsultancy.co

6. But it had an interesting knock-
on effect. Everyone now understood
that customers might want to do
things with their products, that they
hadn’t thought of before. Everyone
understood the importance of quality,
the importance of timely delivery, the
importance of tailoring the product to
the customer need.
https://thechangeconsultancy.co

7. You may think “we could never do that”
Many successful companies have had their biggest growth during the
toughest economic times – and we are arguably in one of the toughest economic
times right now in the UK.
The Change Consultancy is looking for a number of organisations to try out
a new version of the Tribe 365 tool. This tool lets you “take the pulse” of your
organisation, almost in real time. We’ll help you to understand what the results
mean, how much change, and what specifically. We’ll develop and implement the
change with you, whether it’s about better processes, a new culture, changes to
staffing, new technology, changes to company structure.
https://thechangeconsultancy.co

8. We’ll be with you as you see the impact in almost real-time; you can see what’s
working and what isn’t, and do more of what’s working, and change what isn’t –
you’ll never throw good money after bad. In return for getting access to new
technology, we ask for your permission to share anonymized data with Durham
University Business School. There will be costs for Tribe 365 and for the
consultancy, but will keep it tight. Contact us to arrange to meet Oliver Randall or
Dr Hugo Minney now.
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