Little good would come from profits that were ill-gained. It was one of the bank's founding precepts. Today we live in a world driven almost exclusively by economic considerations. BCC was among the first to recognise this imbalance, and it worked tirelessly to redress it with a qualitative dimension.
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Tom Thiss
For over a quarter of century, researchers extolled the benefits of participative management style. Enlightened corporate leaders also mouthed the merits of more collaborative approach. In spite of all this talk, there was little evidence that the idea was taken seriously. It was a subject suitable for public posturing, but in private it was business as usual. The corporate hierarchy prevailed. Policies and procedures ruled. Superiors made the decisions and subordinates carried them out. The key was control.
The corporate community has always been tuned to one frequency: economics. Exhortations to change its ways, however enlightened they may have been. have inevitably succumbed to the sole arbiter of corporate change: profitability. If the decision makers saw no relationship to profitability, participative management was a non-starter.
TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE
All this is changing now because of intense global competition. Business leaders have discovered that the ways of the past are not adequate for the present. let alone for the future. In recent years some of the most admired. most innovative, and most successful companies have demonstrated the profitability of involving their people. Inevitably, others have followed.
The scope and nature of corporate change today is not evolutionary. It is revolutionary. It is change or die!
There is a growing awareness that just doing the same things better is not good enough. This time they have to be done differently. The issue is not improvement. It is transformation.
Transformative change is radical and discontinuous. and represents a break from the past. It calls for new initiatives from all quarters, with an entrepreneurial approach to the market place. It summons all to put aside the patterns of the past, and challenges all to reach out and take authority with fresh new approaches.
AWESOME POWER
Democratisation, regarded by many to be the most significant trend of the twentieth century, is accelerating in the corporate world. The definition of leadership is changing as corporate leaders tell their people they cannot do it alone. They urge all to be leaders - to take actions and to assume responsibility for those actions. The key is no longer control. It is release - release of the awesome power of human potential.
In 1988 Ashridge Management College published Management for the Future, a major research project sponsored jointly with The Foundation for Management Education. In "The Changing Context of Management", it cites six substantial changes taking place:
- An organisational environment that is "flatter". faster moving, market driven, more cost conscious. more fluid, more complex and much more challenging.
- An organisation that has more "surface" exposed to the external environment.
- An increasingly decentralised and fragmented organisation. yet one that is integrated by overall strategy and corporate culture.
- The growing importance of "horizontal" management relative to "vertical" (i.e. hierarchical) management, caused particularly by the need to manage issues such as quality, service and new technology across the organisation.
- An increasingly international environment that will include more diverse cultural groups.
- Unprecedented emphasis on people and talent as the organisation's most precious resources, on the need to utilise human resources fully, and on the need to draw out people's commitment.
PRIORITIES REFRAMED
The demand for quality in the market place is powering the change process. With a total commitment to quality, organisations reframe their priorities to focus on the customer with quality products. quality services. and quality relationships.
They decentralise and flatten the structure to get closer to the customer. They manage "horizontally" to expose more of themselves to the customer. All functions in the organisation be9me sales aids in the service of the customer.
The whole entity shifts its attention outward, asking itself: "How can we help the customer meet or exceed its needs?" This is in marked contrast to the traditional bureaucratic approach, which looks inward and asks: "How can we please the organisation?"
BCC has always stood for quality. Long before the current quality consciousness, the bank incorporated into its being the unity of the moral and the material. The material is the quantitative dimension of banking and the moral is the qualitative. BCC saw from the beginning the inseparability of the two.
Little good would come from profits that were ill-gained. It was one of the bank's founding percepts. Today we live in a world driven almost exclusively by economic considerations. BCC was among the first to recognise this imbalance, and it worked tirelessly to redress it with a qualitative dimension.
COMPREHENSIVE PHILOSOPHY
In his classic book Small is Beautiful, the late E. F. Schumacher said: "The whole point is to give the idea of growth a qualitative determination." BCC recognised early that quantitative growth was a limited concept of reality, and incorporated quality into its management philosophy. By the time Schumacher challenged this generation with the task of metaphysical reconstruction. BCC had already done so with its comprehensive philosophy of Real Management. It redressed the materially weighted imbalance with a sharp focus on the long neglected, non-material aspect of management - the intangible, qualitative dimension of living and ban.king.
BCC was one of the first organisations to codify the "being" values and to include them among the traditional "doing" skills of management. The bank had always been a "doing" institution, but it wasn't afraid to ask the question: "What qualities do we bring to the act of doing?" It exhorted its managers to develop their "being" values first. They could then bring their human "being" values into their every act of doing.
All human transactions have a moral or qualitative context. This unseen context of "being" largely determines the effectiveness of the transactions. It is simply another example of the unity of moral (being) and material (doing).
UTIMATE ADDED VALUE
Today the quality thrust lies in an organisation's total commitment to producing high value added goods and services to gain a competitive edge in the market place. Companies whose performance is superior, however, realise that the ultimate added value is a cadre of committed people - each one competent, creative, and caring in his or her concern for the customer.
The beneficiary of the quality revolution is the customer. At this point quality and service are inseparable. BCC has always seen itself as a service institution. That has always been its quality edge. It prides itself on being a local bank with an international presence in 73 countries.
Published in BCC inhouse magazine, July 1989 issue.
Tom Thiss, was an independent management consultant and trainer from Excelsior, Minnesota, He worked in thirty-nine countries and taught in the business community for over thirty years, and for over twenty years managed The Ridge Consultancy Group in Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A. He provided consultancy services to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the 1980s.