Much has been made about the value of teamwork in accomplishing a company’s goals. Michael Hammer, management consultant, uses a football analogy to point out the value of a relatively flat organisation. Each of the offensive and defensive players has a particular job, but it is executed by co-operating with team mates. A coach oversees the process of carrying out the team’s game plan, assisting the offensive and defensive coaches. In addition, personal coaches give players individual guidance. To respond to changing circumstances, each player must be responsive to several coaches. Sometimes personal initiative is required. Similarly, the manager in a business coaches team members to do their jobs. Managers are not necessarily more capable of performing these tasks than employees, but they are in a position to coordinate the parts of the process and, when necessary, offer individual encouragement and guidance. Like the football team, the effective organisation must not have too many layers of management, otherwise top managers are too far removed from the work processes to offer any useful supervision.
If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there? Basil Walsh
Strategy consultant Adrian J. Slywotzky has a different set of sports analogies. He sees football as descriptive of business in the 1960′s and 1970′s: The pace of football is fast during plays, but quiet during the considerable downtime between plays. Similarly, large firms that made successful plays could take time to catch their corporate breath before the next play. Slywotzky sees the quicker pace of the 1980′s in terms of basketball. Speed in getting new products to market became a more important consideration, especially for producers of new electronic equipment. Then came the 1990′s, with their chess-like mind games. Each move is strategic, but even more important than the next move is a mastery of patterns of moves. Knowing the possibilities for changing the position of each piece and having alternatives series of moves can enable the player to adjust the changing situations. Today, like the well-rounded athlete who learns the rules and strategies of each new game and practices new skills, a serious player in the business field develops the moves and muscle to be a winner.
Sources: Philip Kotler, an acknowledged master of marketing
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