ABSTRACT
The line of reasoning taken in this chapter – i.e., that focus, integration, alignment, balance, and completeness are critical to an organisation’s success – began with this consultant’s experience consulting with a wide range of organisations over the last twenty years. The first problem that appeared prevalent was the alarming extent to which organisations would try to adopt ‘one-size-fits-all’ remedies dreamed up by others and over-applied to the universe of organisations. In many, many cases, this consultant’s experience and the experience of the client organisation was that the remedy quickly became part of the problem and that, lo and behold, one size did not fit all. Many of the management and organisational development approaches proposed to prospective client organisations encourage, directly or indirectly, people to look outside themselves and their organisations for direction, formulas, and lessons for success. People are encouraged to adopt the practices of the ‘excellent’ companies, the Japanese, the innovators’, or the ‘changers’, those who are the most intense, and those who emphasise ‘transcendence’ and purpose. While these proposals may have considerable value, they are often unwittingly pulling their prospective clients off centre by insisting that conclusions reached from observing the practices of one kind of organisation or group of organisations must apply to all organisations. This is surely an over-generalisation or a kind of organisational benchmarking writ large.
