Real Life Examples: A Stubborn Dinosaur

Real Life Examples: A Stubborn Dinosaur 

Finally, my experience at one of the Nordics IT giants. I joined the Consulting Department in the hopes of getting more customer exposure. The department consisted of nearly 70 people, half based in the city of Oslo and half in a city outside I had been promised training at the interview, but when I discussed a training plan with my boss, he did not want to provide this. He obviously felt threatened, he did not want to transfer knowledge and did not want to have a qualified person under his lead. I was surprised about this, you would assume that leaders want the best players for their teams. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. Reality is much harsher than theory. Bosses do not pursue the interest of the corporation, but their own interests.

Now this company was bought by a British group and was undergoing a restructuring process since I joined. I should have been sent directly to the customer but this did not happen, I was left in the office with minor tasks. This was not positive for anyone. At the office, people had been pretending to work for many years. This is very typical in corporations were there is no control over the resources and focuses of inefficiencies are spread out. In the case of Norway, they usually get the support from the leaders who engage in a laissez faire style too condescending with the employees. Not having a clear direction, people start lazing around. It is not common in Norway for bosses to confront their employees. This is more because it is a small country and everyone knows each other. Fighting against the wrong people can get you out of the game. This plays against drivers of innovation, who find a wall towards their adventurous spirit in a conservative culture.  

The work environment that I found was not good. People were too protectionist of their job positions. This is not good either, some of our customers were abroad (in France and Germany). It was imperative to have a reasonably good customer service; you are after all delivering a global service. The times of France are not that of Norway and you need to adjust, whether you like it or not. The people at the office did not understand this, and intended France to accommodate to the times of Norway. You can imagine how that would end up working out.  

I had already anticipated that there was a big storm coming due to the oil crisis. It was imperative to have an aggressive sales strategy to secure ourselves some good contracts before the downturn in the oil markets. I tried to assemble a team joining the people that were idle at the office. My idea was to build upon an internal product to make it more interesting and innovative and boost it’s sales, giving us a stronger foot in the market. There was no interest. The people insisted on taking “home office” (in which they did virtually nothing), instead of coming to the office to collaborate in a joint effort to secure our job positions. They had no incentive to work in an Internal Project since they were not allowed to charge hours for the bonus. I talked to my boss about getting a special timecode for this project so that the people would actually get the bonus, but he said it was not allowed. It was obvious that this was not something the company was willing to invest in, even if it called itself “Innovative”. 

I talked to the Sales people to see what possibility there was to get a project, face to face with the customer. There was not much interest either. I noticed then something very interesting: communication was broken. There was the people at an office outside Oslo, and the people in Oslo. These two groups did not seem to talk, or trust each other. At the office in Oslo, there were three groups: the Consultants at the costumer, a Business Intelligence Team and a Mobility Team. Teams were divided by functionality. In a typical Norwegian scenario, every team would go to lunch in different tables and would not cross words. Integration is not the best in Norway and this is reflected in the work place. A fluid communication is key to boost performance levels. There had to be a better way to organize ourselves to make it easier to expand our market reach. 

Having read the Lean Turnaround [1], I approached the Operations Manager in charge of Lean. He was definitely not doing a good job. We were working with a Push concept, which meant creating the Product first before reaching the market (this resembled more the Ford Assembly Line). I proposed actually following Lean and changing to a Pull concept, researching the market first to see what was the need and then developing this In-house. This applied especially to the Mobility Department, in which you can get more creative developing apps for business purposes that the customers actually need. Consider that we had idle resources, so it was not difficult to do. I got even more creative and proposed the creation of what is called an Innovation House. Internal frictions arise in corporations when innovative ideas come up, since the Managers fear that their positions will disappear or that they will simply lose power. Middle but also Senior Management will be the most resistant. In order to overcome this, the concept of Innovation House implies to support the establishment of start-ups that will work outside the organization, but under the umbrella of the corporation. Free of the chains of politics, they will find it easier to innovate. Once the business is developed and functioning, it can be incorporated to the organization.  

I also suggested reorganizing the teams not based on functionality, but by product family. A mobility department should not consist only of programmers but also of business people. A Simple Finance Team should consist of Business Intelligence people but also Functional Analysts. By going multi-functional the Team gets the benefit of expertise in different fields. Take it like a football team, you want the best players on each position, not a whole team of Strikers, to put it in some way. I am not sure if the Lean Manager did not understand my proposals (maybe they were too Innovative), or if he resisted change himself. In any case, none of them went through.    

You can now see my frustration. I was not allowed to participate in many external projects so I started to keep myself busy trying to figure out how to make the department more productive. I approached the right people but there was no interest in making changes. I also got an invitation to participate in a local start-up camp in Oslo, but was not allowed to join since it was in my contract that I was not allowed to engage in external businesses outside this corporation. In the end, we lost the customers that we had abroad and there was a restructuring in the department. Having been the last one to join and being that Norway is a country of strong unions I was laid off.
It is interesting how things worked out, I was the only person in the Department trying to save our job positions and they got rid of me. I don’t take it personal, it is quite obvious that if there is a crisis it is usually the bottom of the pyramid that is pushed outside. One of the largest companies in the Nordics, these once innovative company had become a dinosaur eaten up by it’s own resistance to change. What comes clear to me is that only companies that look into the future will endure the test of time.

http://www.lean.org/downloads/Byrne_slides_cm3.pdf