Page 106 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

All for One and One for All 87

It read: “Work hard, be clever, have fun, use good judgment.” In effect, this
insightful new employee reduced 150 pages of ponderous prose to a mere
nine words that said pretty much the same thing.
We recommend that our clients follow his lead and keep brevity and
clarity in mind when setting policy. Your goal should be to enable the kind of
creative environment in which problems are solved, productivity is increased,
and teams are empowered. Teams that are burdened by excessive rules and
procedures are likely to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with
internal functional issues and not solving customer problems. Creativity will
most certainly be stifled.

Bringing the Mission to Life

The best way to give a mission statement meaning is to establish multifunc-
tional teams to carry out the organizational values. Many teams manage to
craft mission statements that sound wonderful, but as we mentioned in the
preceding chapter, they are often little more than an exercise with no real
substance. When we begin working with teams, we point out that the state-
ments are only as good as their execution.
Once a team’s mission is developed, and all members have confirmed their
buy-in, the team can solve problems more quickly and institute changes more
effectively than can a handful of loners working on their own. As we have
witnessed with our clients, bringing people together in cross-functional teams
often sparks a flurry of new ideas that, in turn, produce solutions to problems.
Because such teams constantly draw on the diverse experiences and opinions
of a number of people from across the organization, they are better able to
look at the company as a whole and suggest integrated product, service, and
process improvements. In short, multifunctional teams are much better suited
to rethinking the old and leading the way to the new.
In general, an organization’s top management must formally lay the
groundwork and provide the impetus for a team-based structure, although
we have run across teams that seem to form spontaneously. Such an example
drew our attention recently at an East Coast utility.
We have done consulting work for many utility companies, usually audit-
ing on a management level. In the process, we look at the cost of materials
and how trucks are purchased. Used sometimes in maintenance work, some-
times in an emergency, utility trucks are a familiar sight on suburban streets
and country roads. They constitute a major investment for utility companies.