In this chapter, John tells 5 stories of how the principles dictated by the employees and leadership of the Foley pulp mill played out in reality. Was their experimental project in management a success or a flop? Here’s an excerpt:
Involving a cross section of people to develop a direction for our future, and designing a work system to accomplish it, had a very positive effect on the morale and commitment of the Foley organization. This might have been enough to carry the organization through the transition but I doubt it. There were still too many folks in a wait-and-see mode.
These weren’t bad people; most were very good. They liked the sound of what we were proposing; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was “will management see this through or abandon this for the next fad as has so often been the case in the past?”
This is where the rubber meets the road. The sustained consistency of leadership’s engagement – or lack thereof – is what makes or breaks an organizational change effort.
Click here to read the rest of Chapter 10: Walking the Talk
