Open-book management

"Creating a Shift"focuses on ideas that have created positive shifts in organizations. If you've had success with a particular change strategy, contact author Rick Maurer (sending him a sentence or two of description is fine), and he'll get back to you about presenting your strategy to Journal readers. You may reach Maurer at the phone/fax numbers or e-mail address listed below.

TYPICALLY, ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE IS ROLLED out with fanfare complete with PowerPoint presentation. During this kick-off meeting, people are expected to digest why change is called for, and then shift their attention to how they are going to accomplish these new goals. If the change is major, that shift from "why" to "how" occurs far too quickly.

Getting an organization to recognize why a change is important is the single most important thing one can do to build support for one's ideas. When a critical mass of people sees the importance of taking some action, the reaction is akin to thoroughbreds at the starting gate eager for the race to begin.

The principles of open-book management are an effective way to help get everyone, including you, to a shared recognition of a problem or opportunity. The open-book approach gets others to think about critical issues.

Open-book management literally opens the books. Many companies share financial information, industry trends, quality reports, customer service ratings, and so forth. Too often the data that drive a business are accessible to only a few in the organization. Consequently, when leaders announce a change, no one else sees why it is necessary. Open-book management changes that. Here are some elements that can make this approach work.

1) Provide access to critical business information.

a) What are the challenges and opportunities facing your business?

b) How are you doing financially?

c) What do you hear from customers?

d) What other measures do you use to make strategic decisions? Consider opening these up to everyone.

2) All of this information must be timely. Weekly financial data updates are not uncommon.

3) Make sure people can interpret these data. It will do no good to give people financial information if they can't read a balance sheet. Provide whatever training is necessary to help people interpret key business data.

4) Give everyone time to chew on the information so you can all make sense of trends, opportunities, and challenges.

5) Give people a stake in the outcome. Linking pay and bonuses to financial and other critical outcomes can be a significant incentive. It's not just the money that motivates; it's having a clear target that everyone agrees is important. This focuses everyone's attention on the same goal.

6) Give employees the authority to act on this information. When you give people information, they need to be able to do something with it. If you show people depressing quality statistics and refuse to provide a way for them to have an impact on this trend, you are asking for trouble. You would have been better off keeping the books closed. Open-book management requires that you trust people. Trust them first with information and then with the power to do something differently.

7) Make sure people get the data in a way that they can believe. They must trust the source of the data. If they don't trust you, they won't trust the data.

Open-book management works best when the entire organization focuses on these principles, but you can use many of these principles within a single department. It won't be as effective, but it will be far better than what most people get in organizations.

Want more information? Read either ofJohn Case's books, Open-Book Management (Harperbusiness, 1996) or The Open-Book Experience (Perseus Press, 1999). 1 also highly encourage you to read Jack Stack's The Great Game ofBusiness (Doubleday, 1994). In a conversational manner, he tells how he came to believe in this approach, and how it helped him build a highly successful business with little capital and lots of commitment.

Rick Maurer works with organizations that want to accelerate change in ways that build commitment. This column is adapted from his latest book, Building Capacity for Change Sourcebook (Maurer and Associates, 2000). You can sign up to receive his free e-newsletter on change at www.beyondresistance.com. Maurer may be reached by phone 703-525-7074, fax 703-525-0183, or e-mail rick@beyondresistance.com.

Copyright Association for Quality and Participation Spring 2001
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