Page 359 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 19 ■ Strategies for corporate transformation
rigour. All of this is articulated through the style, culture and reputation of the
organization.
As we have seen earlier, all of the above turns on two transformation strategies.
The first demands that we reconfigure resources around value to the customer
and that we put in place credible measures of value at all levels of the company.
Transparency becomes a key attribute of transformation therefore, but focused on
improved performance. The second is to make the ability to learn a central
resource for strategic change.

Learning as a transformational resource

It is obvious that learning and transformation are part of the same process. We
have shown how strategic or transformational change both involve and demand
learning. As we have seen, the learning organization must find ways of ‘captur-
ing knowledge’ and converting ‘tacit’ into ‘explicit’ knowledge. While the orga-
nizational mind-set to create a learning organization needs to shift to one in
which we assume that everyone thinks before they act, a key point is the ability
to capture and convert knowledge. This point can readily be illustrated by look-
ing at the retail sector.
Here, large out-of-town stores sell groceries and electronics. Stores like Toys “ ” R
Us, PC World and Waterstones dominate particular niches. Growth in catalogue
shopping increasingly focused ‘up market’ is a feature, as is direct selling of finan-
cial services (cutting out traditional players in the sales channel). Telephone
banking becomes more important and who knows how huge internet commerce
will become.
All of the above has required increasingly sophisticated IT. This technology
allows organizations to provide advanced logistics, real-time inventory control
R
and just-in-time restocking. But it also allows a company like Toys “ ” Us to
analyse sales patterns in order to identify the toys likely to ‘win’ in the Christmas
shopping period. Immense quantities of scanned data, matched with demograph-
ics, through store cards give large retailers key information about the value chain.

Thus it is that the design and deployment of IT infrastructure can serve a multi-
plicity of purposes including that of learning. In a similar way IT infrastructure
can facilitate what is known as the ‘whole-life’ approach to asset management –
wherein the full costs of capital assets, from acquisition to disposal, are looked at,
measured and managed.

Strategy for corporate transformation

If we see strategic or transformational change as a learning process, then strate-
gies based around Figure 19.1 appear to be relevant. The figure seeks to show the
relevant elements in the process of transformation. The change situation or con-
text will certainly include an environment of radical changes impacting on the
organization concerned. Within the organization we need to be concerned with
the management systems driving the organization towards greater adaptability.

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