 The challenge is part of our culture. Gee, Jesse, why do I have to learn that stuff? I'm not studying to be a business manager, and I don't plan on ever getting into this sort of field. That is the culturally correct concern. That only special business people have to know about organization, special people in leadership positions. The purpose of this course is your empowerment. This is not a course in how you hire and elect the right people to exercise power for you. Working with others in the structured effort is how you discover your power. This lesson is presented as a blueprint for coming together effectively. It can be joining with other parents as a public to promote a more effective education of your children, or coming together as the people of the United States to demand an increase in citizen representation. Empowerment is enhanced by the ineffectiveness of our currently preferred approaches to gaining group results. This provides new opportunities for those who can organize effective efforts. Return to eight-year-old Susie carrying that football. The organization that is not able to bring its own resources to agree on a concept of success, a concept of performance produces drama, not results. Even a small focus group can reset direction of those who are intent on overcoming each other. We begin with the black box itself, and it is a visual tool. It is a tool for someone who has something to accomplish in business. It is a family to support, or a profit to be earned, or some valued end result to bring about to a reality. This takes on greater significance for ongoing business efforts. Corporate effort only continues with an influx of resources, and its inputs have to come from outside the corporation. For performance orientation, we address those outside as customers. They form a symbiotic relationship with the corporate effort. Corporate efforts provide the corporate effort with input through their purchase decisions. Those purchase decisions result from a receipt of corporate products that customers value. The corporate effort converts its inputs into valued products as a way to continue an operation. If the corporate effort produces something that customers refuse to buy, the corporation soon goes out of operation for lack of necessary inputs. If the corporation produces more product than customers are willing to buy, the excess earns no income through sales. And now for this simplistic stuff, what does it mean to you as an individual? You are the one who needs to deliver something of value to others, an understanding of our reality that includes both the value to be gained by others, and the vision of how you can do it. Now you have something to accomplish that includes the efforts of others. You are the one who, in order to set things in motion, have to deliver what others, your effective customers, will so value that they will purchase it with their personal commitments to act. Our subject is personal empowerment. It is how-to for you to gain results through what you decide to do. The efficiency of arranging the efforts of others to gain that performance is going to be part of their commitment. You will not be empowered by just doing what we have always done that gets you the same results as we have already had from our past efforts. Change requires people to do something different. To better see what needs to be done, we open the black box. Again, this is not to see what is inside, but to see what has to be inside for it to accomplish the purpose for having an organized effort. The foundation for this tool, a visualization, is the concept of performance. It is converting what comes into the organized effort into valued output. It is a productive purpose based on a valued result. With a modern business organization, management has to purchase the efforts of employees. That comes with the obvious problem of corporate leadership, assuming privilege and determining what others will value. And that approach works poorly. It creates a second purpose for the organization, challenging the ability to operate to either purpose. We open the black box to see what has to happen, and it is in terms of internal black box units that are necessary to complete the larger performance that keeps the organization in effect. For the larger organization, it supports the delivery of output that is valued by customers to those customers. It supports customer purchase decisions. Our working principle is that the performance output becomes the input for someone outside the working group who needs or wants that output. Performance vision insists that the value of what is accomplished can only be determined by someone who receives it, not by someone inside the organization. Consider that we also address the value of management in like terms. It does not have any direct part in the operation of the performance cycle. Business products do not have business level value as they do not get delivered to anyone outside of the business. What management generates and delivers are internal products, products to be valued by those in the organization who receive those products. So what does management generate and deliver to its internal customers that they both value and receive? We drop immediately back to the vision of the work group in the production area. What does the foreman provide to the workers for them to value? What does the production area manager provide to the production area workers and foreman? It is right back to the value of teaming. It is the establishment of trust relations that are valued by the people who are there to be effective. It is support for the success of support in doing what they have come to value. It is the foreman who in time of need steps into the production line for a worker, even though it is not his job. He steps in because he owes it to those on the line to support their common performance success. He delivers the support those workers need to be a success in what they do. Contrast this with the boss who assigns and receives as his duty. The foreman approached to production work, replaced the boss approach in fairly short order while they were both functional. They both did get the work done. The foreman was able to accomplish more while expending less and also had much better working relations with his charges. So what is the valued service of organizational management? What is it that those who are doing the work so value that they would commit their active support to leadership? It is right back to what was done in production. It is management providing organization by dividing the work into elements that can be resourced to assure each one is successful. It is watching over the operation, stepping in whenever and wherever someone would hamper or distract those who are doing performance. In the production area we have three general types of human assets. We have production workers, those who receive work inputs and deliver work outputs. We have the foreman who arranges, defines, and teaches and monitors the worker efforts. And we have support people whose efforts are to assure that the workers do not have to hesitate in their productive efforts due to any lack of their assigned support. Each of these can be seen in terms of black box units within an opened group effort. It is just like our opened black box for the organization. In management we have managers who arrange, support, and monitor the efforts of others providing them with central purpose and protecting their efforts as they see to it. We have support groups whose natural function is assuring that others in the organization never have to pause in their efforts for lack of their support. The management purpose is gaining performance through those who do the work. The foreman does not figure out what the workers must accomplish. That is defined by the productive output from the group, the value it has to those who receive it. There is no foundation for any foreman setting his own goals and objectives on his workers. They are not there to serve the manager but to assure the performance of the work group in terms of what it produces for others. As each worker is given a task that adds to the performance of the group, so each element of the larger organization is given a task that adds to the performance of the larger organization. As support workers are given the duty to support, so should support elements in management be given the duty to support those who receive their services. We can visualize the relationship between workers and the work group. The open black box for the work group shows what has to happen within the work group. The output of each worker on the production line becomes the input for the next worker. If there is any failure in the first to deliver that output to the second, the work stops. There is no further action by the one who normally would receive. That worker cannot continue to get things done on behalf of the working group. In a like way we have the relationship with management. The work group black box shows the foreman servicing the workers, giving them the structure, direction, training and protection they need to be a success at their individual parts of the group effort. He helps them define success both as individuals and as part of a group that has a productive result. The foreman has no product that gets delivered to those outside the production group. He shares in the success of the people who work for him. In a like way the material handler services those who do the performance for the group. There is no productive result of supply that will separately define success for a material handler. Success is achieved when the supply service meets the needs of those who do the productive function of the group. Our material handler has unique inputs and outputs. He receives parts and materials from outside the group, including any in process outputs from other groups. He delivers these to where they are needed as a service that serves the production workers. He supports and that support service is what he gets to deliver to others. It is an input to their efforts so that they can accomplish what they have to do as part of the work group. In our larger production area with its many production groups the output from each group becomes the input for the efforts of other groups. It is that same black box visualization that allows us to focus on what has to be accomplished for the larger effort to be a success. Each work group has to do its part. Each support group has to satisfy the needs of work groups that are supported. Management has to arrange for the larger effort to be a success with success in terms of product that is ready for delivery to organizational customers. Consider that there is a problem with producing the pin connectors for the car's brake pedals. The pedals cannot be added to the product. The production line cannot do finished assembly without having those brake pedals installed. Those with many production efforts have to work together. The production area values the output of those who create the connector pins. That output becomes the input for the assembly of the automobiles. The whole corporate effort can also be visualized using the black box approach. It includes executive management. The leaders are also employees hired to see to the performance of the larger corporate effort. With the tools we have already developed it is easy to visualize a structure and operation for an organization that will be focused on getting things done. Being able to see this is more likely to be frustrating than effective. The answer from modern management is received from the other side of that barrier between management and labor. It is, that is not the way we do things. If any are so bold as to suggest that it might be better than the way we have done things in the past, the answer is also known. Leave running the organization to those who have been trained and are well experienced in running things. That barrier between management and labor based on production is real and it is maintained by senior leadership honoring their expertise in how they learn to run things. It is based on privilege not on performance and will be just as stable as any other privilege based system. That is the reality. It is that privilege does not surrender to performance. The modern leader runs the corporate effort using the tools of delegation and assignment implementing the purposes recognized by leadership. The modern leader knows how to get things done in such a systemic approach. We have a history that demonstrates a competition between performance based and authority based management. As you should remember, we have encountered this before, it was with workers answering to a boss. The assignment to each subordinate is based on responsibility for a result and it is up to this subordinate worker to figure out the best way to meet that assignment. It is what we had as a basis for employment before Taylor's scientific management and before there was a modern foreman. We also have witnessed to its replacement with coordinated work efforts under the foreman. That approach is a whole lot better at getting things done. And we also have examined a few anomalies that exist in the organizational management area. We know that there are challenges in administrative management approach that are all but ignored by senior business leaders. We know information security and an effort that doesn't even have a product that is an input to the performance of other groups. It has no internal customers. There is no way to even improve its effort. It is technically unmanageable. It just uses the resources that are delegated to the group the best that it can. We know the performance test of value for support efforts. If you spend twice as much for information security, how much more income would the business be able to earn? If you cut its cost in half, what effect would that have? In this, you have a potent tool for presenting performance orientation. It is just another aspect of black box analysis. It is looking for the support of impact of the support effort. The vision is the tool. It is being able to see value relations. This internal support group is like hiring an internal auditor to serve the production environment, assuring that workers are focused on delivering value to the organization. On the production side, it would almost immediately be recognized as a waste, attempting to solve a problem with people as individuals and does not apply to work groups. The output from such an effort would not have value to anyone who was part of the production effort. The vision is the tool. It is not even that such a position might exist. But that administrative leadership would have no general challenge to someone hired to provide this service to production area operations. The challenge is not the one who is employed as an auditor. It is in not seeing how this could be a problem. And then there is the challenge of the organization's customers. They are the only decision makers who decide the health and welfare of the corporate entity. If they decide to buy the products of the corporation succeeds. If not, it fails. It will go out of existence. Customers do not make their purchase decisions based on the goals and objectives of business leaders. In general, they have little if any knowledge of what the corporate leaders may have decided to promote. They make customer decisions based on their personal needs and wants on how well the specified product will satisfy these. And the price they would have to pay to get what they want and need. Getting the public involved in internal business efforts usually takes a corporate leader goal or objective that gets published to customers. We have an occasional but repetitious publication of goals and objectives that are so offensive to customers that they will refuse to deal with the business. For the most part, the really offensive management decisions involve attempts to manage the customers. Decisions to have effect on what they do or how they do it rather than performance. What is truly amazing is that these tend to be otherwise intelligent leaders. But there is no upside to such a publication. There is no way for any such effort to increase the value of their products or services and no way to garner any income from such an effort. It is waste to even attempt such an effort. With current privilege orientation where the focus is on corporate culture, this clear source of performance waste works to limit the customer base to the right customers. Serving only the right customers limits the business income by eliminating customers who do not agree with the policies of business leaders. That is a source of opportunity for future efforts. It is the worst sort of waste and can be eliminated. It is a way to address the inability of a management leader family to run the business for the benefit of the owners. There is no reason for any of them to remain in position of authority except for protecting themselves from criticism. We open the organizational black box and there is management with a clear purpose for its performance efforts. It is to provide support services to the production function that earn income for the business. If it is expending corporate resources doing something else, we can approach that as ways to be eliminated. For evaluation, we have management metrics. We have how much it costs to serve those who are doing the organization's performance. There is good reason for management refusing to even look at such things. There are some performance groups such as our law courts, where we spend far more on management than we do on performance. We open the management black box and there is senior leadership with a clear purpose for its performance efforts. It is to provide support services to the administrative support groups that service the productive effort. Quite simply for the administrative orientation, the management approach starts with establishing and maintaining privilege. These leaders hire someone else to do their natural function so that they can concentrate on running the organization, on exercising their privilege. Performance management is not even an interest. They are planning for the future, guiding the corporate effort to survive and prosper in a competitive environment. They are building a highly functional corporate culture in which hired help are well cared for and protected in their productive efforts. And then these same leaders do something that is economically insane. Publishing a policy that can drive potential customers to deal with their competitors. If you need to put this more fully into our model, it is raising the personal costs of potential customers who might deal with the business. And it is raising that cost only for those unwanted customers. And then what is the answer? How can we possibly address this cultural challenge? The answer is in the negative. The longer you accept that your power comes from overcoming someone else, there will be no answer. The positive answer is that you come into power through unity with others who are then also empowered. We are addressing a huge cultural shift and the cost, the time and effort, will be significant. And then to the good news. You do not have to do it alone. The potency of organization is one of the values presented in the study of human performance. It includes a currently untapped potential for organizational unity. People working together so that their individual contributions do not have to be all that great a burden. For a working observation, if someone is intent on running things, they have to pay people to take part. Seeing to human benefit provides voluntary organization. Performance orientation does not provide a comforting and gentle understanding of our current business culture. It rather looks at measurable results, putting all the things that people do inside the black box. It has focus on just two things. The expenses incurred because of an effort and the value of what results from that expenditure. Consider the example of the U.S. automotive industry. The automobile as common transportation was initiated as a U.S. product. It had a vast public customer base that was eager for the benefits it provided and well-oriented to the freedom that the automobile provided to those who owned one. It had great public value. We will start small. A change in the office automation industry that remarkably increases the support for design prepares a comprehensive database supporting management and increases the ability to maintain communication, introducing the ability to share working efforts over a distance. Of course it is purchased for all those advantages, but performance orientation leads to challenges. Is this going to cost the business more to operate than previous management efforts? Is the value of this system going to increase income from sales? The focus of administrative orientation is on what people do, not on what they accomplish. Asking performance questions is likely to get a very harsh response on how you, by asking, are indicating your unwillingness to be a team player. Think of all the new things that having the system make possible. This can give wings to those working in management. The contrary question from performance orientation, will management cost be reduced? Or the service provided to performance be increased so that the cost is reduced in productive efforts? The focus of administrative orientation is on management giving good directives to those who are producing value for the organization. It is not on management providing value to production, but on management giving effective direction to working groups so that they do the work. It is management harvesting benefit from what productive efforts do. The deeper value sought by administration is stability, as maintained by administration. Challenging administration to reverse course when production can't see the benefit of what management does, is unlikely to yield beneficial results. It is likely that the cost of management will go up some minor amount with no impact on either sales or income. The U.S. automotive industry owned the business in the United States and administrative leadership set out to harvest benefit from corporate operations. It hired an army of employees to do the productive work and established a fairly traditional management system to service the employees and their operations. Leadership directed the design and advertising efforts to determine a profitable and effective business direction assuring good earnings from delivery of product to the customers who would buy. To get full advantage, competent people were hired into production management to set up a production area that would create and deliver product as designed. It worked well right up until foreign products started to be available. It was soon obvious that the customer base was not all that impressed with the value that domestic industry was prepared to offer. Foreign products were entering into competition for the U.S. customer base. It worked right up until workers organized into unions who didn't even share the same customer base. Their product was worker services, affecting the cost of labor. It was not only cost in dollars but cost in time and restrictions on how management had to treat its productive employees. The first response was advertising, getting those customers to buy what privileged leaders had determined to sell. Leaders have tried to negotiate with those rebellious employees who gathered in unions to exercise competitive privileges. And here we are with initial performance orientation. Competition yields drama, not performance. Entering into competition with customers only led to further customer choices. That did not include domestic product. Competition with workers achieved nothing but drama and contention, not performance. The cost of U.S. automobiles just continues to rise and there is open competition from foreign car makers who build their products right here in the U.S. In performance orientation we see an entire industry that suffers from privileged leader activities. We see worker unions that are every bit as effective as leadership in performance matters. So how much should it cost to own and operate a vehicle that gives a high level of personal freedom to the owner? We do not have any good answer, only the witness to extensive industry waste. So how much is a vehicle worth to the customer? The answer is in the purchased decisions of people like you and me. We still buy them, but there is not a whole lot of alternatives. Leadership has done its best to assure that the automobile is without competition. Next, we are to observe the automation industry with its rapid and frenetic development and marketing environment. It provides us with a cradle-to-grave example of industrial products, another that should be especially interesting is that of the D-Base program by Ashton Tate. It was a program that prospered along with personal computers, providing a good working environment for a small database application. It had facility for database design, programming and setup, data entry and data query. They all worked together reasonably well. For performance, they acted like the personal computer itself and served the user. It supported a single user who had reason to store, retrieve, manipulate and present tabular information. As personal computers evolved to greater capacity, so did this program, providing for more involved and complex program structures to maintain data. It supported some interactive data exchanges where users could share information between personal computers. Seeing the potential, the program grew to address centralized database applications with interactive programming capabilities supporting even macro data collections. This expansion was not well accepted by the data industry. There were a number of existing macro database managers and they already had their own following and the new D-Base product did not compare that well with these. For our purposes, for performance orientation, we returned to the early program and addressed customer and product. The product was for the individual who had data to manage. It provided a workable means to create a working data structure and harvest beneficial information from it. The value to the user was in its function, its ability to support business performance needs. It served the lower level manager and savvy office worker with a tool to handle data. It continued to do well when it was in that pattern, largely expanding the way that the individual user could handle data. But it did face a problem in competition with other programs, a problem of making data useful to others, working outside that individual user environment was awkward. It was addressed by upgrading the program to support multi-users on a single database. The lesson here is a harsh one. The black box for the improved product shows that the focus was no longer on serving the original user. The functionality for the individual user was subordinated to a much larger and more expansive program that served others. This was a very successful business that abandoned its customers. Decisions were made by those who ran the business to serve people who were not customers. The result is that their product ceased to sell. Customers do not concern themselves with senior leader decisions. They make their purchase decisions based on their own needs and wants. Leadership in that business made decisions to serve some other customer base and their business dried up. Improving a product by increasing what it can do for people is very attractive to modern senior leadership, but ignores the basic needs and wants of customers. When those needs and wants remain the same, increasing the cost, time, and effort the user must expend to use the product reduces its value. Human performance is highly consistent. We have a collection of people doing a productive effort to complete a performance cycle with customers. The question is how much their needs and wants for administrative support are going to change. Do the production efforts get the benefit from data systems? Is this what the foreman will value in getting his or her people to team effectively on a productive effort? Will an improved financial system be able to better see that workers and materials are brought together to create and deliver product? With the black box open before us, we see the working relationship in terms of what flows between internal black boxes. The output from when black box becomes the input for the next. The value of management is in the support that working areas of the business both receive and value in completing that all-important performance cycle with customers. So what is the value of a consistent and stable business culture to those who are performing the productive function? It is then that we realize that people, human beings, value working together. It is only when they pause from their joint efforts that cultural interaction becomes important. When people work as a team, there is no benefit from the consistency that is provided by a general business culture. To be fair, it does have value in the boss environment where people act as individuals. Consistency can raise the general expectation of what individuals will do. Its value is realized where people are assigned work as individuals and authorized by their office jobs. Consider management goals and objectives and the effect that these have upon the workers who are teamed in a productive effort. There is some obvious value in planning for future and being able to take advantage of things that happen in competitive dealings with the marketplace and changes in customer values, but that is not goals and objectives. Planning is a basic management function, one of the few performed directly by modern business leadership. There is value in potential product additions and changes that will be valued by customers or by new customers. Leadership can identify and initiate changes that deliver value both externally and internally. These are management functions of leadership. The challenge of administration is not one of doing management but of interfering with it. The bellwether for this is a centralized database, a tool that has little purpose beyond helping leaders run their organizations. It is a way to monitor performance without having to deal directly with people who are assigned duties and responsibilities. Keeping that data is duty aside to subordinates that keep the data as a way that serves senior leadership in preference to serving their local needs. It is a way to go around the assignments made to subordinate managers, a way for them to serve the leadership function instead of serving their needs. Of course, such a tool is wholly aligned with the leadership purpose of running things and is accordingly accepted widely as a justifiable expense. In our next session, we will be expanding upon what we have here for the purpose of efficiency in management. It is building an approach for evaluating and measuring the elements of management and support to identify areas where improvements are likely to be found.