This Fortune 50 operating company’s quality and reengineering initiatives had ceased to generate improvements. Yet it was clear that many opportunities still existed for achieving better business results. In response, the CEO chartered a task force to identify cost-cutting opportunities.The task force chartered by the CEO discovered that the barrier to reducing costs was the company’s culture—a top-down, authoritarian system that systematically reinforced the wrong behaviours. Employees were not supported for taking initiative or assuming responsibility for change. Instead, the system reinforced the wrong behaviours: passing the buck and concealing both problems and opportunities.The SolutionProject leaders recognized that the company’s…
