General Electric is famous for growth through acquisition and becoming one of the most successful businesses on the planet. The success resides with people like Jack Welch, former CEO, who started the ‘Quality & Change’ revolution within GE almost fifteen years ago. With total revenues for the business easily topping $110 billion, with double digit ROI for at least the last twelve years, the robustness of the Business Culture has proven its worth.
Assess where your business is today…………. Philip Atkinson has worked in many GE businesses precisely on these initiatives using many of the GE tools and has synthesised an approach that will work for many organisations in a variety of contexts.
How would you feel if you could build the same culture and what would it do for your business?
What is the core competitive differentiator?
Do you know that speed is the core competitive differentiator, focusing upon doing everything faster, better, more efficiently and effectively than your competition?
Do you know how to kick-start and drive this approach so it becomes the dominant culture?
Does over-control and bureaucracy slow down or speed up your service delivery?
Jack Welch argues that bureaucracy is the enemy of change. How many levels of management do you have in your business? Too many?
How much management time is spent over-controlling and over-managing others rather than developing new profitable business?
How many signatures do you need to get even the most basic requisition agreed?
Would you prefer that managers invested their time in developing others to challenge and improve service delivery?
What are the secrets to the GE approach to culture change?
Simplicity of the approach is easy to understand.
Strategies can be adapted and applied to any business.
Basic principles can be speedily implemented.
Leaders of the business who want to improve ROI and results in the short and long-term can do so through an enhanced variant of the original WorkOut methodology.
Change is driven through Leadership and Behavioural Change
Everyone can input their creativity, their talent and their energy into the process.
Focus on leading change through specially trained Facilitators.
Change can take as long as you want it to take – if you want to drag out the results for a year, so be it! If you want results in six weeks, let us design the process to do that for you!
Tell me more about Leadership & Behaviour
Any good business person understands that without Leadership there is no change.
It makes sense to develop Leaders first of all to challenge how things are done – otherwise why have them? Are they in post just to manage and control others? What a waste of resources, when they could be living a transformational role, creating opportunities for doing things better, faster, cheaper.
Leaders need to be aligned and go further than merely espouse the values of real change. They have to live the values.
The single most important thing a Leader does is inspire others to perform to their highest standards, and then use this as a benchmark to which others can aspire and achieve.
Behaviour promotes behaviour. If you have a lousy manager, chances are your management style is not the best either.
Leaders are made, not born – the Leadership fairy did not arrive by accident to bestow charisma and challenge – this has to be developed and can be done so quickly.
Simply WorkOut is about promoting how we want people to start, stop and continue behaving to develop a strong competitive edge.
Can the WorkOut approach really work?
Yes, and it has to be led from the top.
It must focus upon core processes that enhance profitability and customer satisfaction, thus delivering shareholder value.
It can start small or large. It can start in a cross functional process throughout the whole business or in just one functional area.
It can take as long as you want it to take. If you want results in six weeks from commitment to the process – then set your calendar today.
If you are not interested in improving business results, or are more interested in “tree hugging” for its own sake, then commit to a less adventurous process.
If you want to find out more about the practical issues, the strategy for change and core implementation contact Philip Atkinson. He has worked with GE on many projects in the UK, Europe and the USA since 1988, in GE Plastics, GE Motor Finance, GE Capital and GE Global Consumer Finance. He has worked on developing his own methodologies, stimulated beyond the original ideas and utilises these to best effect in a variety of businesses and industries.
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