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1、精品资料网（） 25 万份精华管理资料，2 万多集管理视频讲座 精品资料网（） 专业提供企管培训资料 Untangling underperformance MATTHEW ROBB, PAUL TODD, AND DAVID TURNBULL The McKinsey Quarterly, 2003 Number 2 Organization Here is the paradox: many companies know they have great strategies and great people, but their performance doesnt meet the as
2、pirations of their top managers or shareholders. The cause of this disappointment may even seem obvious. If the CEO assigns a small task force of senior managers or highfliers to find the answer, it will quickly pinpoint the immediate culpritsconfused accountability within the leadership group, perh
3、aps, or an unforeseen shift in the balance of power between business units and the corporate center. Once the task force has identified the problems, the CEO may be tempted to fix them straightawayfor example, by spelling out the accountability of different executives or rebalancing the rights and r
4、esponsibilities of the business units and the corporate center. But performance-sapping organizational problems like these may have complicated roots linking one problem to another. Unclear accountability at the top may be symptomatic of a serious power vacuum within the leadership group, and this m
5、ay be spurring business units to become more autonomous. Trying to fix what is actually an effect of the problem rather than the cause wont solve anything. The kind of high-level, outside-in diagnosis that reveals the problems undermining performance is unlikely to afford insights into their root ca
6、uses, how they are linked to one another, or how to sort them out. Getting more people to step inside the companys workings and uncover the complex roots of underperformance can be the first step toward developing lasting solutions, as the case of ManufactCo (not its real name) illustrates. COLLECTI
7、VE DISCOVERY ManufactCo, a manufacturing organization with 8,000 employees, produces and markets its products in more than 20 countries. In the 1980s and 90s, it went through acquisitions that brought in a heritage of varied business cultures and ways of getting things done. Three or four years befo
8、re the period described here, ManufactCos return on capital employed (ROCE) had been in the industrys top decile. Yet over those years, its performance gradually dipped into the second quartilegood but not leading edge. The organization wasnt doing as well as almost anyone in it thought it could. Le
9、aders at ManufactCo werent sure why it had lost its performance edge. Its products were strong. It had a good reputation and high-quality people. Managers and employees placed an extraordinary emphasis on delivering high performance. At the beginning of every year, the center and the business units
10、negotiated stretch targets for each unit. Every month the units submitted to the center detailed financial results, with key performance indicators and updated annual forecasts. The CEO publicly challenged the heads of the business units in regular management meetings: he dug into the numbers to dis
11、cover what had really happened in the previous quarter and tested the executives on the competitive environmentall to gauge what level of performance might be possible. Targets were thus often increased throughout the year. All unit managers attended these quarterly reviews, and the sense of theater
12、 they created was a powerful incentive for each manager to come prepared to give a convincing performance. Despite the strengths of this process, the company persistently fell short of its aspirations. STARTING TO DIG One newly appointed business division head felt so strongly that ManufactCo had lo
13、st its performance edge that he was determined to do something. But he also felt sure that there was no simple fix and that ManufactCo would need to understand the problems fully before they could be solved. He therefore invested an unusual amount of time and resources in diagnosing ManufactCos perf
14、ormance issues, starting the process by 精品资料网（） 25 万份精华管理资料，2 万多集管理视频讲座 精品资料网（） 专业提供企管培训资料 assembling an unusually large team composed of a dozen future leadersnot yet business-unit heads but highflierswhose role was to pinpoint them. The team began by interviewing 60 members of the organization: th
15、e entire divisional leadership team and about 30 others who represented all key functions and businesses again, a lot of people for a diagnostic exercise. The members of the interviewing team had no preconceived ideas about what they would discover. They built the interviews around ten open question
16、s, crafted not to lead the interviewees, covering behavioral and more formal, structural issues. Among other things, the team asked, What are the barriers to improving performance? Do processes facilitate or get in the way of delivering performance? How effective is teamwork? What strengths of the organization are worth preserving? After half a dozen interviews, it was clear that the leaders generally agreed on the companys problems, if not the solutions. For one,
