Prepare With Eighth Habit: Toyota Motors- A Benchmark
Posted : March 27, 2006 at 8:11 pm [IST]
Stephen Covey, the famous management guru wrote ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ in 1989. As reported, the book touched a cord with millions of people around the world. His latest best seller is ‘The 8th Habit’. Covey is on a new theme: helping individuals and corporations adjust and thrive in the new knowledge era.
The 8th Habit is to find your calling, your soul’s calling, your voice and to inspire others to find theirs. Earlier management paradigms have addressed industrial workers that were controlled by a formal authority in a primarily topdown, hierarchical and bureaucratic style.
Covey finds that with wealth creation shifting from money and machines to people, this paradigm is irrelevant for today’s new era of knowledge workers. To survive new and shifting challenges, organisations need to have a vision, to differentiate important activities from urgent ones, to find new ways of working. Once that’s done, organisations need to ensure that everyone in the team is not just involved with the goal, but also know how to contribute to it.
Of course, none of this is simple.
Data shows, only 15% of organisations identify top goals, and even then, they collapse because of failure in frontline action. This happens because only 19% of the workforce have ownership of these goals and just 49% spend time on important activities to support these goals, while the rest do not understand their role in executing organisational goal.
Recently, Covey was in New Delhi on a lecture tour. He tried to explain his philosophy of the management in the changed environment. How does one deal with people who don’t open up? If team is empowered to take decisions, will the traditional boss be superfluous and disappear? Will his role be changed in the traditional organizational structures? How do you create the will to change and switch over to the 8th habit?
His exclusive remark about Toyota was interesting. It makes one feel how a manufacturing company can excel as one of the best companies of all sectors. He said:
“I would say Toyota is one of the finest organisations I have seen because it has transformed almost its entire workforce into knowledge workers-knowledge about the economy, about the industry, about the company. And they have a synergistic relationship with their suppliers. It is not a winlose approach. But they are eating Detroit for lunch.”
As per covey, many organisations in almost every industry have moved from a culture of blaming to a culture of responsibility.
Why the elite of management in India keep on talking of changing the labour laws and making it the excuse for not competing in manufacturing? Why can’t the management take the responsibility of teaching and training the employees, particularly the bottom rows till they are convinced to participate in the mission of the organization as responsible member?
It is unfortunate but still most of the companies in India are not doing this and keeping the employees uneducated and without a broad skill levels. Why can’t they follow Toyota principle of educating all the employees? Will it be too costly or is it because they are not convinced that it can give some improvements in the bottom line of the company?
- Indra
Category: Industry/Management |
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