Egol, Morton, "Information Age Accounting: Catalyst and Enable of the Self-Organizing Enterprise", 1995

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Information Age Accountin;
Catalyst and Enabler of the Self-Organizing Enterprise
by Morton Egol
Partner, Arthur Andersen

Executive Summary

A paradox of the Information Age is that while the sheer quantity of data and information has grown exponentially,
the quality of understanding is typically declining. New technologies are driving accelerating change and complex-
ity, leading to greatly increased uncertainty and heightened business risk.

There is widespread recognition that the old “command and control” decisionmaking model, which relied on
the insights of the “brains at the top” of the organization, is inadequate to cope with today’s challenges. Yet nothing
has emerged to take its place. Management has responded to change by reengineering core processes and decentral-
izing decisionmaking through “empowerment” of employees and cross-functional teams; but such efforts, while a
step in the right direction, have generally not been successful. Instead of increasing the organization’s capacity for
creative and timely response to radical changes in the marketplace, the changes frequently have amounted to mere
downsizing — leaving the organization and its employees more anxious and fearful of change than before.

What has been lacking as support for true empowerment is a “self-referencing capability” for the employees
and the organization as a whole: a new form of accounting that will go beyond traditional after-the-fact summaries
of transactions and overall financial performance.

The information contained in traditional accounting systems and management information systems is not struc-
tured in a manner that facilitates a shared understanding of the business. It does not convey whether value is being
created, or whether progress in fulfilling organizational purpose is being achieved. And it does not empower
employees in a way that enables them to make a significant contribution — let alone to contribute the front-line
insights that are essential to keep the organization in touch with marketplace reality.

To bring the “self-organizing enterprise” into existence, a new accounting system must be created — one that
does not merely monitor the empowerment process more closely, but actively facilitates it. This mechanism is the
new accounting system that we refer to as Information Age Accounting (IAA).

Unlike today’s accounting, which provides after-the-fact analysis, [AA will provide the organization with real-
time information that establishes a clear basis for decisionmaking. Unlike today’s balance sheets, which reflect the
resource-based economy of the Industrial Age, IAA will inform investors, employees and other stakeholders of the
organization’s true potential for long-term profitability and growth, which is increasingly based on intellectual
assets: the ability to innovate, to generate creative strategies, and to implement them more quickly than competi-
tors. And by keeping the organization itself focused on those factors, [AA will also serve as the foundation for the
continuous organizational restructuring that will be necessary in the future, enabling employees to become self-reg-
ulated, self-motivated, and self-improving (Figure 1).

The Business Enterprise and a New World View

Clearly, these are ambitious goals. Yet this new and expanded approach to accounting is in harmony with the radi-
cal changes now taking place in business and every aspect of political and social life, driven by new technologies
and increased global competition. On a deeper level, the new approach also reflects humanity’s passage into a new
mode of thinking: Systems Thinking, which views systems and their contexts as a unified whole.

From time immemorial, humankind has sought to attain greater control over its destiny by conceptually divid-
ing the world into disparate parts. This analytical approach gained ascendancy after the Renaissance, when Galileo
proved with the aid of a telescope that the earth revolved around the sun and Newton set forth the laws that gov-
erned the movement of the planets and all motion and matter, describing the universe as a machine, “a hermetically
sealed clock.”

By 1776, analysis had been applied to business in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which explained how
mass production could organize and divide up work in order to produce goods at a fraction of the cost of individual
craftsmen. The source of wealth was no longer human muscle or human brains, but energy applied to matter, with
humans as an extension of the machine.

But these assumptions were shaken in the 20th century. Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the quantum
physics that followed, led to the discovery that at the center of the atom there was nothing — only a field of energy.

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System Dynamics '95 — Volume II

Arelated discovery, the Heisenberg Principle, demonstrated that it is impossible to observe simultaneously with
high precision the position as well as the velocity of a particle. It showed, moreover, that the act of measurement is
itself a tool of fragmentation that cannot be applied effectively to a part of the whole, but must incorporate the
entire field of change.

The limitations of reductionist thinking were further highlighted by a new science, “general systems theory,”
inaugurated in a 1950 book by the biologist Van Bertalanffy, who noted that certain common properties were pre-
sent in all systems, including animal life, the physical universe and human civilization. Jay Forrester of MIT made
a unique contribution to the field of System Dynamics by developing techniques for applying these concepts to the
study of business organizations, and, in recent years, organizational theorists such as Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge
and Margaret Wheatley have built on the foundation he created.

General systems theory teaches that all successful systems contain “self-organizing principles” that allow them
to adapt in order to preserve themselves. It further teaches that the essential properties that define any system are
properties of the whole, possessed by none of its parts. The whole is not the sum of its parts, but the product of
these parts’ interactions, all within a broader system. Synthesis, the opposite of analysis, is thus required for true.
understanding: it is important to make sure not just that the system is working efficiently, but that it is doing the
right things in its broader context.

Applying these principles of “systems thinking,” it is clear that to survive and prosper in this ever-changing
world, the business organization must incorporate a “self-organizing principle” that enables it to obtain and process
the full range of information it needs in order to deal with complexity. The business must not only make sense of
itself, but must also understand the external, larger system of which it is a part — and it must do this in real time, not
after the fact.

In harmony with these principles, Information Age Accounting measures the full range of the organization’s
growth and development as it occurs. Moreover, because IAA is able to serve as the central source of management
information and overall organizational learning, it actually enables growth to occur. Far more than traditional
accounting, Information Age Accounting is in alignment with the new factors creating organizational value in the
Information Age.

The New Factors Creating Value

In the Industrial Age, when the pace of change was slow, a company’s profitability was largely the result of its geo-
graphic access to raw materials and to markets for its finished goods. Barriers to entry were substantial, and product
lives were long. Market dominance could be sustained for long periods of time, with fairly predictable financial
results.

Under these conditions, traditional accounting was suitable as a measurement tool. However, in a time when
the sources of profit in the new brainpowered economy are largely intangible, and subject to rapid change, tradi-
tional accounting has severe limitations.

As Peter Drucker has noted, traditional “profit” is actually a cost — the cost of capital that one must earn to
stay in business. The only true profit is the excess over the cost of capital that may be realized through market dom-
inance for the relatively short time after introducing a new product. With this time cut to the minimum in the post-
industrial world, profitability becomes largely a function of innovation in new product development, creativity in
strategy formulation, and speed in getting new products to market.

Since it continues to focus on measuring physical assets and transactions, traditional accounting fails to place
sufficient emphasis on the innovation, creativity and organizational learning that increasingly constitute a large por-
tion of an organization’s value and future potential. Further, by skewing measurement toward the short-term needs
of investors, the old accounting limits the organization’s ability to understand how it can best create value over the
longer term. In addition, traditional accounting largely fails to depict organizational performance in the context of
the larger economic system and the major trends affecting that performance.

Information Age Accounting, by contrast, creates a framework that enables employees to understand the busi-
ness as a system — treating it as an indivisible whole, and making its complex workings explicit and intelligible in
order to show how it creates value. Information Age Accounting begins by identifying all key variables in the value
creation process; describing how they are connected; and, specifically, displaying the interactions of such “soft
variables” as commitment, innovation, customer loyalty, organizational learning, and others that drive value cre-
ation in the Information Age. And it uses the best possible source of accurate information on these factors: none
other than the empowered teams of cross-functional decisionmakers themselves.

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A Participative Decisionmaking Process

The new decisionmaking process made possible by Information Age Accounting will be both decentralized and
participative. Cross-functional teams will meet to share their observations, to collaborate on diagnosing problems,
and to formulate strategies for business success and continuous improvement.

Though this process will be collaborative, it will require skilled facilitation, using computer networking tools
that can handle complexity. Facilitators will, in turn, need to have an objective and holistic view of the corporation,
as well as the documentation skills to develop reports that reflect the consensus of the group, and that provide all
participants with sufficient knowledge of the system to act on the information provided, Facilitators will enable the
teams to simulate and assess the impact of their actions on the whole business before decisions are made — and will
also allow information to be rapidly summarized and disseminated throughout the organization, thus assuring that
all teams have the benefit of each team’s insights.

The logical candidate to fulfill this role of facilitator is the professional with the firmest grasp of all the factors
that create value; the objectivity to test those factors against reality; and the ability to document those results with
authority: in short, the new accountant. By improving the gathering of information, as well as thinking and deci-
sionmaking based on that information, the new accountant will be central to the value-creation process.

A New Language for Assessing the Whole

One essential tool deployed by the new accountant will be the causal loop diagram, created by “Systems Thinkers”
for explicitly depicting the structure of the organization as a holistic system. Process-owners of cross-functional
teams will collaborate in identifying the connections among key variables, and create a graphic representation of
the system by connecting corresponding causal loops — which represent the feedback mechanism of reinforcing
and balancing forces that are present in every system. This process of connecting the system variables through
“closing the loops” is akin to the process of debits and credits in the present transaction-based accounting system.

Making the system explicit means not only drawing the loops that display relationships of key variables and
the interaction of the parts, but also explicitly taking into account the time-dimensional factors of speed and delay.
If critical success factors are not brought into play at the right time, the most robust strategy could be rendered
inoperable, and an entire investment put at risk. The causal loop diagramming process therefore calls for displaying
the risk of delay. This time dimension, in turn, adds to the system’s ability to depict complexity and simulate many
possible futures.

By making the whole system explicit and giving it the dimension of time, causal loop diagramming enables
everyone in the organization who is involved in decisionmaking to understand current reality in the light of organi-
zational goals, and to see their own impact on the whole.

Dynamic Simulation

After the relationship of all key variables is agreed to, values are assigned to the variables, and a computer model is
developed which can be used to create simulations of organizational performance under various alternative scenar-
ios (Figure 2).

Without the aid of a computer, the human brain is not capable of comprehending and calculating the full range
of complexity addressed by Systems Thinking. Causal loop diagrams can display the relationships of the variables
that together constitute the “system,” but those variables must be quantified before the consequences of these rela-
tionships can be fully known. Moreover, using simulation tools to test the model may reveal gaps and errors in the
perceived relationships.

Computer simulation can also make it easier for management and employees to strengthen their decisionmak-
ing skills in advance of any real risk. In all other fields of endeavor, such as music or sports, there is extensive
learning before the fact. In business, too, the pace of change and high-stakes competition increasingly makes “prac-
tice fields” and learning before the fact highly desirable. So far, however, such simulation has been available on
only an extremely limited basis.

While no one can predict the future, and projections are instantly obsolete, the computer simulation tools of
Information Age Accounting allow users to create numerous alternative views of the future and “practice fields” to
learn in advance of action. This facilitates the ability to create proactive strategies, to develop or acquire new core
competencies, and to change more rapidly than competitors, rather than sticking with unproductive routines.

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System Dynamics '95 — Volume II

Such simulation can also facilitate changes in the organizational structure, represented and tested through
changes in the computer model. However, these changes are not necessarily made as a result of the thinking, mod-
eling and learning done at the local “issue” level. Instead, teams pass on the results of their work to a central func-
tion which assesses the potential value in adjusting the organization-wide model.

Because the formulas that go into the computer simulation are the very factors that investors seek to discern for
their own decisionmaking about the enterprise, the computer model can also serve as a communication tool for
selected external stakeholders who may be given passkeys to access the computer model on a customized, selec-
tive-access basis... enabling stakeholders to compare actual performance to anticipated results, and thus optimizing
their ability to assess organizational value and the true benefits of investment or other alliances. The new account-
ing system thus creates a “kaleidoscopic” view of multiple scenarios that can help all stakeholders, internal and
external, see the hidden consequences of their alternative choices.

An Integrated Approach to Decisionmaking

Because IAA will enable organizations to learn before doing, the linear Shewhart Cycle of “plan, do, monitor, act
(change),” will be replaced by a more iterative process that reflects the nonlinear reality caused by accelerating
change (Figure 3).

Planning, doing, monitoring and evaluating will all be part of an integrated decisionmaking process, with a
high proportion of the learning moved to the front end of the process. Strategic thinking will not be a discrete func-
tion separated from the line organization, nor will the evaluation and monitoring be done by a separate group;
instead, these activities will be the province of all collaborative decisionmaking groups.

The new model will rely heavily on a system of self-assessment and tools to support Systems Thinking and
statistical analysis of business process performance. Each employee will be trained in process mapping, casual loop
diagrams and tools of statistical analysis, and encouraged to use them continuously to assess his or her part of the
system.

Rather than using computerized knowledge to drive humans, automation will thus be used to support human
decisionmaking through the parallel processing of human brains, the most powerful computer of all. People will
use their brains for what they do best — creative thinking, interpretation and synthesis — while computers will be
used for what they do best, data processing and analysis.

Spurring Intrinsic Motivation

Besides providing the practical benefit of useful real-time information, and learning in advance of the fact,
Information Age Accounting will yield a powerful emotional benefit as well: fostering intrinsic employee motiva-
tion that gives life to the organization’s purpose.

It is a fundamental law of general systems theory that when a system no longer has a purpose, it dies. An orga-
nization’s purpose explains why it exists in terms that attract and motivate people who share its underlying set of
behavioral values. The people, in turn, sustain and advance the purpose that gave the organization life.
Organizational purpose is the magnetic pole that aligns employee commitment, providing both the organization’s
explicit direction and the rules by which work will be done.

Information Age Accounting provides a mechanism for defining and adhering to organizational purpose — as
well as for changing the organization’s direction, when that is appropriate. By creating a holistic view of the orga-
nization, it will satisfy employees’ need to know how their contribution relates to the whole.

Thanks to the sharing of information about the impact of specific team actions, the work environment will
evolve toward one based on “intrinsic motivation” in which individuals, better able to control their own destiny
through information, voluntarily enter into cooperative, mutually beneficial thinking and working relationships
with their fellow employees.

This intrinsic motivation will largely replace the extrinsic motivation characteristic of the old command-and-
control structure, as the “whip” of external authority is supplanted by employees’ self-management and peer-group
assessment. It will spur maximum effort and creative ideas for improvement.

Intrinsic motivation also means that relatively few employees will have as their only jobs monitoring or mea-
suring the work performed by others. Instead, employees will be self-managers, assessing their own performance
and the system of which they are a part. By bringing summaries of their work and observations on the system to the
attention of their own collaborative, cross-functional decisionmaking teams, employees will be able to evaluate
whether they are performing in a manner that optimizes their performance — not just as an individual or function,
but as an organization-wide system.

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In the hands of the intrinsically motivated employee, self-measurement also translates to self-improvement.
“Self-assessment” of performance by the individuals who are themselves accountable for performance will foster
pride in workmanship and form the foundation for “first-time quality.” The employee will have a better-defined
sense of what changes he or she needs to make in order to optimize performance. A finer calibration of perfor-
mance is also possible when effects are seen immediately, rather than in the ultimate payoff of financial “results.”

Ultimately, leadership is accountable to stakeholders for results. But true empowerment means that both lead-
ership and employees are responsible for understanding the system, sharing their vision with other stakeholders,
and providing continuous feedback in order to continuously assess organizational performance against this shared
vision. Leadership and employees, for example, must be concerned about realizing their organizational potential as
it is perceived by the shareowner; and this means that they must fully understand shareholders’ expectations con-
cerning profit and dividends.

A Common Language of Organizational Potential

But even beyond questions of immediate profitability, the assessment of organizational potential is at the heart of
the accountability process. Leadership and employees must be committed to expanding the longer-term potential of
the organization by expanding the industry and creating new business opportunities within it.

Results must be redefined to utilize real economic measures that allow stakeholders to assess whether the orga-
nization’s potential and capabilities are improving relative to industry and key competitors, and whether adequate
progress toward the vision is being made.

Such an assessment requires that the following elements of organizational potential be routinely available
through the new accounting system: market size and expected growth rate; relative market position; innovation and
related investment required to achieve market share objectives; target costs relative to industry cost structure; rela-
tive strategic advantage; relative organizational learning; relative capital structure and financing capability; cost of
capital required for new investments; and other relative capabilities, including core competencies, innovativeness,
key process performance, strategy alignment, and commitment.

Instead of an undue focus on profits or a “bottom line,” attention must be paid to the organization’s ability to
manage the interrelationships of these key variables... not in a vacuum, but in relation to each other.

Forging New External Linkages

Beyond the organization’s ties to investors, there are other crucial external relationships that will be facilitated by
the use of Information Age Accounting. For example, the computer models used in IAA can be linked to customer
interface systems, enabling organizations to work more effectively with customers in the closer linkages that are
being made necessary by competition.

The information that a corporation gathers in order to meet customer requirements can also be shared with its
investors and other external stakeholders in order to persuade them that the company is, indeed, in command of its
competitive destiny. Enlightened companies will recognize, for example, that by improving the information flow
between them and their suppliers — rather than constantly “squeezing” them — they can achieve the kind of coopera-
tive, long-term improvement that can reduce inventories, improve quality, or increase reliability of service.

Even competitors will become more closely allied, as further efforts to minimize risk, increase knowledge and
coverage of the global marketplace and reduce the costs of R&D will lead to more joint ventures and “strategic
alliances” (like the one between Apple and IBM, for example) that were unthinkable just a short time ago.

In sum, a wide range of trends is working to enmesh corporations ever more inextricably in what may be
termed a “web of enterprise” in which the interests of a company’s owners are intertwined with those of customers,
employees, suppliers and community, and in which information will accordingly need to be shared more openly.
Information Age Accounting is an effective and self-renewing response to these trends.

Conclusion: A New Mode of Accounting Can Unleash Organizational Potential

The changing nature of work in the Information Age, and the new ways in which organizations create value, will
make inevitable the deployment of a new approach to management information and overall stakeholder communi-
cation. And this, in turn, necessitates a new system of accounting and a broader vision of accounting’s role.

The existing mode of accounting reinforces the outmoded “command-and-control” management paradigm in
which decisions made by a few “smart people” at the top have been the means of controlling the behavior of those

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System Dynamics '95 — Volume II

below. It keeps management and employees focused on easily measurable short-term activities, rather than on the
more difficult job of building the organizational capabilities, relationships and market positioning that create long-
term value.

Under the new paradigm, accounting, instead of serving primarily a controlling function, will become primar-
ily a tool for empowerment. In the process, it will actually increase alignment to organizational purpose, a new type
of “control,” but without constraining performance. On the contrary, it will yield increased organizational control...
derived from the order that emerges out of the disequilibrium created by autonomous structures, and from the self-
correcting tendencies provided by enhanced information. And as this enhanced information gives employees and
organizations greater control over their own destinies, information will also become an intrinsic motivator, enabling
employees to understand and value their contributions to collective success.

Moving from traditional, transaction-based accounting to Information Age Accounting will not, by itself,
transform organizations. If it is not implemented in tandem with a vision of employee empowerment, the new
accounting system may actually lend itself to greater control through more measurement, rather than better mea-
surement to enable greater empowerment.

But the trend is clear. As technologies evolve to permit the freer and more copious flow of information,
humanity is already evolving toward a more democratized organizational form — a “self-organizing enterprise” that
derives its competitive advantage from its ability to unleash the potential of all its employees in order to achieve
excellence.

Accounting has a golden opportunity to facilitate this process of organizational transformation. It will do so by
placing less and less emphasis on taking intermittent and partial snapshots of “results,” and more and more empha-
sis on developing a comprehensive, continuous understanding of organizations as systems. In providing a “view of
the whole” to support empowerment, the new accounting will become an instrument not just of organizational suc-
cess, but of personal liberation — facilitating the understanding that frees individuals to excel, the social recognition
that motivates them to excel, and the collective rewards and learning that will foster their further growth.

© 1995 Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen & Co, SC. All rights reserved.

469
Parallel Program

Figure 1

Information Age Accounting: The Conceptual Framework

Today's accounting system, a reflection
of reductionist thinking, does not create
a view of the organization as a whole.
Thus, it does not meet the needs of
multiple stakeholders, nor can it meet
the needs of the emerging "self-
organizing enterprise."

To cope with increasing complexity,
the new accounting must provide a

picture of the dynamics of the
business, to understand the business
as a system, so that those working on
and in the system will understand its
purpose and will possess a self-
referencing capability necessary to
improve the system as a whole and
the interaction of its parts.

Enhanced Thinking
and Information for {tm | Enhanced
i Organizational
Continuous =
Restructuring Leaming
Tools for Thinking,
Leaming, Decisi
—— Making, & ay
Communication ——
i Integrating Thinking,
bein ‘Learning: Deciston: ‘The Self Organizing
Business as a : ~ | .
Making, & Capability
‘System rs
‘Communication
~_]| ‘The New Graphical ee
Language
Focus on Factors that
Create Value and rely
on Self-Assessment to aw -
Measure Performance Assess Strategic
Alignment &
Organizational
Potential
Incorporating Time. 4
Dynamics.
Dimension

© 1995 Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen & Co, SC. Alll rights reserved.

470

System Dynamics '95 — Volume II

Figure 2

Information Age Accounting: Enhances Understanding of the Business as a Complex System

on two factors — pervasive
autonomous structures and a self-
referencing capability; i.e., a view
of “the whole” organization as a
system. Self-referencing capability
depends upon the clear articulation
of the firm’s purpose and values,
combined with an understanding of
where the business is positioned on
all the important indicators of
conformance to purpose and values.

‘Understanding
Bi oN

LO
Relationship iin a
Management
\a of
Access to. “=
Capital
“~

Profit ae

Clarity of .

Fea he viva. and

‘Values

desired conformance is enabled by
innovative uses of information if
designed (a) to enhance the capability
and productivity of people throughout
the business, and (b) to provide an
arena for learning for all employees —
ie., an improved understanding of the
business. In this model, an organization
evolves through the learning/self-
assessment process, by the catalytic
effect of a “budgeting” process which

t ., ut
‘Total Customer Costs to es
‘Orders rey and Values
Competitor's Mageing Production sale, Service
Orders t ra Sait catty mdAdmin Stat
ane NO Repeat Price Self-Organizing Capabilit Capstility fs lity “Capability
Growth _ Orders bility
al Relative rv a Sree,
“Attractiveness lignment Trust Purpose! uality &
and Cooperation \_ > R&D Work Productivity
“ Peon
‘Competitor's Reputation arketing
Attractiveness’ mu Work Purposeful
Product Performance Production
Wak Purposeful
Customer
Market Awareness Service
Product Availability
Customer Satisfaction
Self-organizing capability depends The capability to assess actual vs. is informed by the company’s

commitment to its purpose and
values. After some delay — the
time required for purposeful
investment to be converted to
attributes which increase relative
attractiveness — the budgeted
resources are transformed into
more traditional measures (profit,
customer feedback, and market
share) which confirm the validity
of the firm’s business theory.

© 1995 Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen & Co, SC.

. All rights reserved.

471

Parallel Program

Figure 3

Information Age Accounting: Integrates Thinking, Learning, Decisionmaking and Communicating with the

Doing of Purposeful Work

With the accelerating pace of change, the traditional Shewhart Cycle model
of “Plan, Do, Monitor and Act,” reflective of a linear view of the world,
needs to be modified to reflect a systems view.

In the brain-powered economy, the new goal of organizational design is to
enhance “organizational learning” and “self-organizing” capabilities so that
Thinking (including strategy formulation) and Doing at a structural and event
level are fully integrated in purpose, process and time. In the new economy,
thinking and learning should no longer be considered as separate and apart
from work.

Planning becomes more of a continuous learning process. And by integrating
self-assessment by process-owners with the actual doing of work, and
constantly feeding the results into the learning process, the loop of Thinking
and Doing is closed. The computer modeling tools that are the “reporting”
vehicle of Information Age Accounting are integrated with other
communication and decision support tools to operationalize the system.

Decisionmaking

Self Referencing Capabilities
(Values and Purpose)

the Business

‘Communication

Shewhart Cycle

Act

Monitor

LL NIL ONO

' Systems Continuous Self-Organizing
Understanding Thinking Learning Capabilities

ES KY

Purposeful
Work

Plan

Do

© 1995 Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen & Co, SC. All rights reserved.

A72

System Dynamics '95 — Volume II

Figure 4
A New Paradigm for Accounting

OLD NEW

Financial Information Information for decisionmaking
Transaction-based Process-based

Retrospective focus Future orientated

Reductionist Thinking Systems Thinking

Incomplete Holistic

Owner orientation

Multiple stakeholders — customer focus

Company specific

Relative performance and competitive position

Cost-based operating results

Value factors linked to processes and strategies

Production stage focus Design stage and life cycle focus

Measures inputs, variances and financial results Measures processes, outcomes and change in organizational potential
Reporting tool Integrates thinking, learning, decisionmaking and communication
Productivity Quality, time, service, value and productivity

Monitoring is a discrete function

Self-assessment integrated with work processes

Incomplete analysis of processes

Systems thinking tools

Linear information

Graphics and matrices to explain nonlinear relationships

Limited cross-functional knowledge

Technology-based organizational learning

Static, inert

Dynamic simulation, a learning system

Helps doing things right

Helps doing right things right

Measures book value

Helps create stakeholder value

© 1995 Arthur Andersen, Arthur Andersen & Co, SC. All rights reserved.

473

Metadata

Resource Type:
Document
Description:
A paradox of the Information Age is that while the sheer quantity of data and information has grown exponentially, the quality of understanding is typically declining. New technologies are driving accelerating change and complexity, leading to greatly increased uncertainty and heightened business risk. There is widespread recognition that the old "command and control" decision making model, which relied on the insights of the "brains at the top" of the organization, is inadequate to cope with today's challenges. Yet nothing has emerged to take its place. Management has responded to change by reengineering core processes and decentralization through "empowerment" of employees and cross- functional teams; but such efforts, while a step in the right direction, have generally not been successful. Instead of increasing the organization's capacity for creative and timely response to radical change in the marketplace, the changes frequently have amounted to mere downsizing- leaving the organization and its employees more anxious and fearful of change than before.
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Image for license or rights statement.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Date Uploaded:
December 18, 2019

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