April 2, 2008
Back To The Cottage
Chapter 10
Walking the Talk
by John Sipple
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.
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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
Chapter 8: Design Team
Chapter 9: The Design
