Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Leadership and the art of Changing the Engine

How many times do we get that feeling that the organizational systems are not able to cope up with the demand of the process?

What do you do when you realize the system was built for a particular load and that we are streaching it to breaking limit?

To put it in context, lets restrict ourselves to organization processes and supporting systems, workflows etc.

And what do leaders do when they encounter such a situation?

Most of the times the pressures to perform and to deliver are so great that we end up with a patchwork of incremental improvements and quick fixes.

But taking the analogy of the car - it has an engine with a maximum horsepower and performance capacity. We can get it to deliver great results and enjoy the ride till the time we restrict to pushing the car below the max capacity.

Changing the upholstry and repainting it and also changing the driver will not make the engine go beyond the capacity it has been designed to perform.

Similarly with organizationals systems - changing the process owner, or the user experience, or giving it fancy UI will not make the system deliver to load beyond it was designed for.

It is logically time to change the engine!! No, not overhaul it, and getting a Formula 1 driver will not solve the proble either!

So go check out the engines that you are attempting to push beyond their limit - and then replace them!!

Good leadership is all about knowing which engines to replace before they break down.

see you..

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