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Assessing Your Organization’s Health 181

Intellectual tasks are more difficult to observe, although you can attend
work team and task force meetings and review current documents, reports,
and other analytical displays. You can attend and observe key activities such
as team meetings, project management activities, sales calls, and/or field vis-
its. Review and analyze meetings, and compare what is happening against what
should be happening.
Work location is a part of work flow analysis. Are the right tasks being done
in the right place? For example, what are the consequences of validating or
correcting field data at corporate headquarters rather than in the field? Should
elements be completed off site by a subcontractor? Should tasks be consoli-
dated at a single site?

TARGET 9. EXTERNAL FACTORS INCLUDING
LAWS, REGULATIONS, COMMUNITY, AND SOCIAL
OR ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
Many industries, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, chemicals, food
processing, insurance, banking, transportation, and manufacturing, are regu-
lated by government agencies and laws. As regulations change, they affect the
way business is done. To analyze the present regulatory climate and how your
organization responds is a part of the diagnosis. For example, as health-care
insurance, food labeling, and production become increasingly regulated, the
laws will affect the way managers conduct both research and development and
marketing.
Legal judgments strongly affect future performance. Up to 50 percent of
the cost of many products (for example, lawn mowers and all-terrain vehicles)
pays for product liability insurance to protect the manufacturer from lawsuits
brought by misuse of the product. In the health-care field legal issues almost
always affect product development and costs. The United States has limited
capacity to manufacture vaccines for infectious diseases in large part because
there is a small but real chance, or the perception, that children inoculated will
contract the disease from the vaccination itself, with possibly fatal conse-
quences. This was one of the reasons that there was a shortage of the neces-
sary vaccines during the N1H1 flu outbreak during the fall and winter of 2009
to 2010 in North America. So even though the vaccine is of great benefit and
required by local and state public health officials, the damages recovered by
parents of those few children who have died from the inoculation over the