Fast change at Weyerhaeuser.

The organization design process started in January 2005, with an implementation target of January 2006. Weyerhaeuser's goal was to consolidate the five product-line businesses that had been part of three acquired companies into one customer-facing division so the customer would experience a single point of contact for all products and services. This was an organization with 15,000 associates, and, in one way or another, each of them was going to be touched by the redesign outcomes. So, the design process involved teams from across the entire division, representing manufacturing, sales, marketing, engineering, new product development, etc. The teams' job was to define the roles, responsibilities, and relationships needed to execute the new business strategy. They came up with several organizational design options and conducted a rigorous review process to determine which option would provide the most value to customers and to Weyerhaeuser.

After months of active discussion and debate, the new organization was presented to the CEO who then approved it. A leader for the division was selected in June 2005, and an executive leadership team was selected using Weyerhaeuser's "next-generation" succession plan. Since the next-generation leaders were very much involved in the development of the new strategy, they were committed to see it implemented properly. Key leadership positions were filled across the organization, and a launch event was held in October to introduce iLevel to the division's 300 leaders. This two-day business simulation session let people experience the new strategy first-hand and be personally involved in the launch of the new iLevel brand. They were then the internal champions of the transition and completed the staffing of their organizations based on the new strategy. In January 2006, the iLevel organization became a reality. 



Design and implementation at Weyerhaeuser was developed to avoid the execution gaps which come about because of the following seven shortcomings:

- Failure to ensure that there's a deep understanding of the “why” behind the new strategy … and failure to get real buy-in or alignment from the leadership team about critical priorities. The plan was to avoid going forward with unexpressed ambivalence.

- Not engaging a critical mass across all levels, locations, functions and businesses.

- Not dealing with the organizational inertia that comes from legacy mindsets and leadership skill gaps.

- Not having the right tools and processes to maintain transparency and accountability.

- Failure to maintain momentum and sustain initiatives over time, as the energy and the urgency tend to slip away..

- Failure to focus resources where they will have maximum impact by using critical leverage points.

- Failure to manage the “Now" and the "New” simultaneously, operating in a world that's not "either / or."

More details tomorrow.

High-velocity execution.

"Fasten your seatbelts. The turbulence has scarcely begun. With accelerating speed we've transcended boundary after boundary of diversity and complexity. The past is ever less predictive; the future is ever less predictable and the present scarcely exits at all" - Dee Hock

In the current fast-moving business environment, companies have to move faster than the rate of change and faster than the competition if they want to stay ahead. The longer it takes to implement strategy, the more likely it will be out of date by the time it’s in use. Murphy’s law warns that the more time it takes, the more likely something will go wrong. We also know that the quicker the implementation moves, the less opposition it’s likely to encounter. Today, it’s better to be 80% right fast than 100% right slow. However, there’s a conflict here between going faster on the one hand and going into more detail and involving more people on the other.

769 CEOs from different countries reported in a recent Conference Board survey that their number one strategic concern was excellence in execution. Over 80% said they’ve failed to effectively implement important strategic initiatives even after spending considerable time thinking about and planning how to introduce them. However, it doesn't have to be like this, as the following case study illustrates.

Weyerhaeuser is a proud sponsor of ABC television's hit show, Extreme Makeover/Home Edition. Every week Weyerhaeuser's products go into creating a new home for a richly deserving family. Ironically, the deserving families on the show aren’t the only ones in need of a major renewal. Weyerhaeuser needed one too - an extreme makeover of one of its key businesses.

For many years the residential wood products industry seemed immune to the significant changes driven by technology and consolidation experienced by other industries, and was able to get along with business as usual. In 1997, that began to change, and the changes started with its customers. 

In 1997, the top 100 builders accounted for 18% of all housing constructed in North America. By 2005 that percentage increased to 37%, a doubling of market share. The growth of larger builders helped fuel the US real estate boom because of newer, faster ways to build homes.

These new approaches also brought dramatic changes in expectations for construction suppliers. Larger builders wanted to exploit their size and scale to create far more efficient ways to build houses, while also dealing with a shortage of skilled labor. Builders achieved significant improvements: The time required to frame a house dropped from three weeks to just five days for the most efficient builders. They increased their use of prefabricated wall sections, roofs, and floors delivered directly to the foundation site, ready to install. All of this required suppliers like Weyerhaeuser to do things very differently.

Their strategy was to target large builders with a set of experiences that would make their jobs easier, delivered through a network of big dealers and distributors. This was done by creating the "iLevel" brand. This new brand consolidated five product-line businesses into one new business. The goal was to increase the percentage of iLevel product that went into the construction of every new home built in America. The result: In its first year, 2006, product penetration grew by 5% (this was the single biggest jump in a decade). 


Five critical success factors helped to make this transformation happen very, very quickly – in 90 day segments. These five factors were: 


1. The new organization was designed around the needs of the customers. 


2. The transformation was executed with high velocity. 


3. It engaged a critical mass of key leaders. 


4. There was significant investment in training and communication. 


5. The cultural aspects of the organization were given the highest priority. 



I’ll continue this case study tomorrow.

My Macintosh computer, a poem by Gary Snyder.

I've been a happy Mac user since 1985 and so has today's featured poet, Gary Snyder. Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and has worked as a poet, essayist, travel writer, translator, and educator since then. He's been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1974; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1997; the John Hay Award for Nature Writing in 1997; and most recently the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2008. A prominent environmental activist, Snyder served for many years as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English, as well as a member of the California Arts Council. His philosophy of life is, "Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there."

Why I take good care of my Macintosh computer by Gary Snyder

Because it broods under it's hood like a perched falcon
Because it jumps like a skittish horse
and sometimes throws me
Because it is pokey when cold
Because plastic is a sad, strong material
that is charming to rodents
Because it is flighty
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers
Because it leaps forward and backward
is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a rock
& it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of
gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods
strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at
"delete" so it teaches
of impermanence and pain;
& because my computer and me are both brief
in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me
right inside the tent
And it goes with me out every morning
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Developing broader skills.

In the past, technical employees developed specialized skills by delving deeper and deeper into narrow fields of expertise. They also tended to stay in one position or area for a long time before moving up or out. Many got promotions or became managers because of their specialized expertise and their ability to combine analytical reasoning with intuition sharpened by years of experience. In the future, however, a narrow specialist risks becoming a liability rather than an asset.

More complex technology calls for combinations of new and different skills to operate and solve problems. Changes in engineering education already reflect this trend toward broader expertise. Carnegie-Mellon had merged electrical and computer engineering into a single degree program. Cornell offers a combined civil and geotechnical engineering degree. A high-performance culture demands new skills and capabilities that will enable specialists not only to solve problems by themselves, but also to help others learn what these specialists know. Doing so requires interpersonal as well as technical skills.

So, organizations that promote people solely on their records as individual contributors are likely to pick the wrong people. In the past, we've tended to promote highly structured, analytical, action-oriented people. In the future, we'll need people with agility and flexibility, multi-focused thinkers able to integrate many different kinds of information, who can get above the details of their own departments and detect patterns and opportunities where others only see chaos.

In high performing companies, success depends not just on what functional specialists do, but on their connections and interactions with others. This doesn't just come about automatically. It comes by widely distributing leadership responsibility throughout the firm. Business literacy is a big issue in developing leadership. You can't ask people to exercise broader judgement if their world is bounded by a very narrow vision.

This new evolving world has some perplexing paradoxes:

- Being in control means being a little out of control.

- Although people will work in small groups, they'll have to stay in touch with many more people.

- Even though new technologies allow people to communicate effortlessly with countless others, they risk becoming more isolated than ever before.

Just-in-time training.

In order to deliver more timely training, Apple transformed many of its training resources into ARPLE (the Apple Reference, Performance and Learning Expert). Apple's employees around the world can all use ARPLE, on-line and on-demand by means of its Ethernet technology. As a result, Apple replaced most of its former classroom training with just-in-time multimedia learning platforms. These are constantly updated to reflect current state-of-the-art information and learning.

Carnegie-Mellon University teaches its engineering students advanced math concepts as they need to apply them, not in separate math classes. I've found that employees acquire and apply concepts and skills more readily when they feel they need them, and when the knowledge they acquire proves immediately useful on the job. The software industry uses just-in-time instruction by including built-in help commands that allow users to ask for assistance, and then access different levels of detailed instructions at their own pace.

Just-in-time learning, delivered when and where its needed, takes control out of the hands of instructors and puts it instead into the hands of learners. Adding video-servers and training materials into groupware networks delivers on-demand training that users can access 24-7 at their own convenience. In addition to classrooms where employees learn about implementation by working through case studies, progressive companies use computer networks to structure meetings where employees can work together to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.

Increasingly, smart companies rely of formal training courses only to convey highly volatile information that's changing too quickly to make it worth saving.

Thoughts on training.

Disney’s “pixie-dust” formula for generating committed employees has four key ingredients - selection, training, support and benefits.

Speaking of training, Lutron Electronics, a maker of lighting controllers, has factories in Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and St. Kitts in the Caribbean. Employees at all three plants share a common core training curriculum, specifically designed for the unique demands of mass customization and flexible specialization. As part of their development, employees rotate through different work cells in the factory, staying in each until they're judged to be proficient. This qualifies them for greater pay.

Workers in the Caribbean, in keeping with their plant’s make-to-supply charter, are taught to improve their skills on automated equipment. In Pennsylvania, employees are taught the nuances of make-to-order customization, interfacing directly with customers and visiting their sites. When business conditions change quickly, training has to be fast as well, able to provide immediate results.

Lutron leverages the capability of its technical designers across the whole sales and manufacturing process by building intelligence into its products (e.g. light dimmers) so customers can create what they need by adapting the product to their own requirements. Training a small number of people and using technology to leverage their skills is an effective way to defend against the cost of training large numbers of people who may leave and take their skills elsewhere.

Here's some advice about career self-reliance in the new economy. Think of yourself as a business and be clear about your area of expertise. Define your product or service and know who you’re going to sell it to. Understand the value you add for your customers and invest in your own growth. Know where your field of expertise is headed, and be willing to change and start a new business when it looks like your current one is becoming obsolete.

The new employer-employee contract should go something like this: You’re responsible for your own career. Your employer, will help provide you with experience and training that can keep you marketable, but not necessarily give you a job forever. If you work smarter and produce high quality goods and services, in return, the company will give you personal recognition, continuous training, and a good living. For both lower level employees and professionals, staying competitive is the only real job guarantee in the global economy. The twin tasks of teaching and learning should be ingrained as a major responsibility of every employee.

The late Anita Rodick, founder of The Body Shop, explaining that company’s decision to provide courses on aging, urban survival and sociology as well as courses on products and customer service, said, “You can train dogs. We wanted to educate our people and help them realize their full potential.”

Using managers as trainers.

O K, now you've got the hiring process under control, what will you do with the employees to bring them up to speed once you've hired them? Here's a plan followed by the award-winning Ford engine plant in Romeo, Michigan.

The hourly workforce at Romeo were transitioning from a tractor plant which had previously operated on the same site and had never built engines before. Therefore, considerable technical training was required both prior and subsequent to start-up. Since the plant was organized in work teams and the workforce had no previous experience with these ideas either, extensive ongoing employee social-skill development was also needed. Additional training aimed to develop employee business skills, so people could understand the plant's performance goals and track their progress in meeting them.

Several delivery systems were used to provide training for employee development at Romeo. These included instructor-led classroom training, off-site seminars, video training, stand-up computer-based training, self-instructional computer-based training, interactive video training, and experiential on-the-job training. Most classroom training was developed and presented by Romeo employees, most often by the plant's management team. These instructors were given “train the trainer” courses prior to developing and delivering their programs, with special emphasis on including group and team-based activities.

Many benefits were gained when the plant leaders acted as instructors:

- First, they built learning relationships with the participants, and were seen to be real experts in the content being covered. Over time, this developed into an on-going working relationship where the employees felt more and more comfortable calling on the instructors when there was a problem in their functional specialty.

- Second, as the managers taught courses in their areas of expertise, the plant leadership was perceived to be competent and approachable, instead of distant and removed from day-to-day operations.

- Third, the interaction in the classroom kept the leadership up-to-date about issues developing on the plant floor.

- Fourth, employees got their questions answered directly by those who were the most knowledgeable in the plant about the topic of their concern.

- Fifth, there was visible consistency between the training and the plant’s operating philosophy, which stated that the role of management was “to assure people have the atmosphere, resources and abilities to do what is needed to produce the highest quality production engines in the world, and to develop teams of employees who are the best engine builders in the world.”

During commissioning and start-up, many one- and two-day off-site team planning and training sessions were conducted, some involving as many as 600 employees, sub-contractors and suppliers in the same place at the same time. (A large meeting hall was built for this purpose and was subsequently donated to one of the local churches). These sessions were designed to deal with actual situations being experienced by the employee teams during start-up. Some of the tasks undertaken during these meetings included:
- clarifying the wording of the plant’s mission and operating philosophy;
- reviewing it’s application in real life situations to be sure everyone understood what was intended and implied;
- analyzing how well individual teams were functioning;
- clarifying the responsibilities and accountabilities of individuals and teams; and
- resolving problems within and between teams in operating the plant.

This overall training process was subsequently given the "Best Team Training in America" award by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).