In my last article - High Performance Teams: Having Efficient and Effective Meetings
(May, 2009. Pp39-44) - for this magazine, I
talked about the processes of producing good meetings and the waste of time that
bad meetings create. According to Steve Kaye "Bad meetings waste a fortune. My
surveys show that companies waste almost 20% of their payroll on bad meetings."
I think that is an underestimate.
What I did not stress in that paper, and what is the topic here, is the actual
product of those `good' meetings - the decisions.
I often say that an organization is run on three resources: money, people, and ideas.
If I ask who manages the money I get the CFO right away. People managing is a
little more difficult - I often get "Well, HR,
sort of ". If I ask who manages their ideas
I get blank stares. One firm actually said
"We do not have any ideas." To me,
decisions are simply crystallized ideas which
direct people and money in this way or that. Organizations seem in the department
of the deeply clueless about their central importance, as well as the processes
that do (or often do not) produce them, and the quality of those decisions and processes.
So the goal of every exceptional and impactful firm is to make"high
quality decisions." This perspective - that
decisions are the fundamental basis for a firm's
success and failure has been articulated in a
series of articles in the Harvard Business
Review, and most recently in an excellent article
titled "The Decision Driven Organization" by
Marcia W Blenko, Michael C Mankins, and Paul Rogers
of Bain & Co. They comment:
An army's success depends at least as much on the quality of the decisions its officers
and soldiers make and execute on the ground as it does on actual fighting power. A
corporation's structure, similarly, will produce
better performance if and only if it improves the organization's ability to make and execute
key decisions better and faster than competitors. |
