Feb 13, 2008
Back To The Cottage
Chapter 8
Design Team
by John Sipple
Starting his new assignment reorganizing the run-down Foley pulp mill in Florida, John begins building his cross-organization leadership team. Here's an excerpt:
Over the years the people at Foley had been used to a certain style of leadership, which could be best described as directive and "top down." Bosses decided and workers executed (more or less!). People had no ownership in what went on, they did only what was required to assure they'd get their paycheck each Thursday. Back in the day, the original bosses knew how the run the operation, but they gradually left for other assignments or retired, leaving less accomplished replacements to manage the ever-more-experienced work force. This is a formula for disaster in most work places.
At Foley, some effort had been expended to smooth management transitions, but always in the old "top down" style. No buy-in from the organization was ever achieved. Over the years, performance decayed incrementally, matched by a growing cynicism that anything dreamed up by management could never be right.
Assembling a cross-organizational team to play a serious role in determining the future of this major (and major-ly underperforming) business unit was — to say the least — a challenge. This was the only hope we saw for creating a setting where all parties could have meaningful input into the future of the business. In that respect it was a legitimate attempt to develop a kind of Cottage setting — a small, team-oriented work group within a large organization. If it worked it might be possible to replicate the model across the whole organization. But if it failed, it could spell the end for the business unit.
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Back to the Cottage — More PDF Downloads
Back to the Cottage unpacks John's numerous leadership experiences and traces the development of the values that made him an effective leader. These are the lessons learned not in a high powered educational institution or a corporate leader development boot camp, but in the family's cottage business of his youth.
Preface
Chapter 1: Field Tested
Chapter 2: The Cottage
Chapter 3: Cottage Principles
Chapter 4: Shuttering the Cottage
Chapter 5: From the Cottage to the Corporation
Chapter 6: The Case Study
Chapter 7: Searching for a Strategy
