Hi Guys,
Originally Posted by Bill Jakola
If you are looking for a private industry example of organizational change that makes more sense, take a look at the case of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in the late 1970's; it is a very close analog. In that case, by ~1975, KLM had dropped about 6-7 points in market share, down into the low teens, and brought in a new CEO.
His first couple of months was spent looking at complaints from customers about frustrating experiences with front line employees. Figuring that this was the key driver behind market share loss, he started working as a ticketing agent (can't remember which airport), and realized that the organizational regulations totally hemmed in the front line workers to the point that they could not make any responsive decisions but had to pass it back up the line (in military terms, an insane ROE combined with totally inappropriate METL). In order to solve this, he required that all senior executives had to spend 2-3 weeks out of every quarter working in a frontline position (think about a 2 star General running a squad). Within the space of a year, the rules and regulations had been cut by a third (from ~60,000! down to ~40,000), and most of the rest had been harmonized so that the frontline workers had a wide range of allowable options to solve immediate problems.
Where the senior leaders come in in this form of organizational re-engineering is in the area of "lived experience" as well as "push". The truly crucial "A ha!" experience came from those same leaders realizing that what looks good on paper interacts with everything else to turn a good idea into an operational nightmare. The forced experience of working in a frontline position meant that they had an immediate, in their gut, feel for any new regulations that were proposed.
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