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Many managers share no productivity or profitability data with their
employees. Sometimes the managers have no good data themselves. Some
managers insulate their employees from the hard realities. Some don’t tell
because they don’t want to give employees financial and productivity infor-
mation when times are good, in fear of greater salary demands. Other man-
agers don’t want to alarm employees that their jobs, even their company, may
be in jeopardy.
Organizations with little mid- and lower-level pressure to improve often
provide employees with too little information. For an organization, especially
one that is marginally profitable, to withhold profitability information from
employees is to court disaster. Since employees have no reason to believe there
is a problem, why should they change? To change their culture, they need to
see the data themselves. Dissonance is created only by real, believable data
indicating there is a problem.

6. Doing too much, too soon. Organizations are capable of managing only
so much change at one time. Change disrupts the work flow, slowing or bring-
ing things to a halt. Well-managed change affects the organization while not
seriously disrupting the ongoing work. The opposite is also true. Organiza-
tional and business change efforts can be highly disruptive to ongoing busi-
ness and priorities if they are not led effectively. This dynamic is not limited
to businesses. For example, newly elected government administrations can
become so preoccupied with priorities they choose to focus on, that other ini-
tiatives suffer. Some have argued that the war in Iraq during George W. Bush’s
administration and the ongoing focus on health-care reform during Barack
Obama’s first year as president prevented other important initiatives from
being addressed effectively. When possible, a reasonable principle to follow is
to work on one, two, or at the very most, three priorities at a time to build
momentum and a pattern of successful implementation. The conclusions from
your diagnostic work will provide a firm basis for your priorities.
The goals in the business plan that Morgan and his 14-person group devel-
oped were ambitious:

■ Three new target industries, including one they knew little about but felt
had parallels to their base business
■ Three new products for old customers, including two that would need
considerable organizational time to develop