Want to Grow? Watch Your Language

Michael Rothschild

This article appeared in Forbes ASAP (October1993)

Ray Stata is far from alone in his frustration. Despite the hoopla surrounding the latest management fashions, the track record is dismal. A recent Arthur D. Little study reports that two-thirds of the 500 quality initiatives launched by American firms yielded no significant quality improvement. An A.T. Kearney review of TQM (Total Quality Management) initiatives at over 100 British companies showed much the same. And, Michael Hammer, guru of the "reengineering" craze, openly admits that 75% of such efforts fail.

Other than herd instinct, it's tough to explain why so many hard-headed executives are pouring so much energy and money into TQM and reengineering. The only reasonable answer seems to be that "hope springs eternal," that everyone believes his company will win the corporate lottery and overcome the long odds against success.

Few executives pause to ponder the crucial question; namely, "Is there some hidden obstacle that keeps most of these reform initiatives from taking root?"

A small cadre of executives and management consultants believe they've identified that obstacle. And, oddly enough, they claim that the culprit is language. Michael McMaster, of the London-based consulting firm bearing his name, points to the "machine speak" that dominates conversations inside most companies. "No matter where you go," says McMaster, "you'll hear same 'organization as machine' talk. Overhaul the division. Fine-tune the company. Tighten controls. Pump up sales. Shift gears. Balance operations. "

"Language is the source of culture, including corporate culture. Language shapes mindset," according to Martin "Bix" Bickson of Seattle-based Bickson Seeton & Company, "Most people in most companies simply can't understand why continuous quality improvement is so vital. The idea of continuous change is alien to the notion that a company is like an engine. After all, engines don't keep redesigning themselves." "By relying on machine imagery, we restrict ourselves to what works in a machine," says Martin Gillo, European head of human resources at microprocessor-maker Advanced Micro Devices. "Something is missing when you try to talk about the learning organization. What's missing is the appropriate paradigm."

TQM, reengineering, and learning organization initiatives fail to take root in most organizations not because they are inherently flawed, but because their shared commitment to on-going change clashes with the most deeply-seated yearning of the Machine Age mindset -- the desire for stability. As one high-ranking executive of a major U.S. manufacturer recently confided to consultant Michael Cook of Cook Miller Associates in Rochester, New York: "I'm totally supportive of our quality programs as long as they don't disrupt things around here."

As the Information Age unfolds, a dizzying pace of technological advance is forcing more and more companies into nonstop restructuring. But since "machine speak" lacks the words to articulate or justify this need, the search is on for a new organizational metaphor. "To me the new language has to be biological," says AMD's Martin Gillo. "It's the only way to explain to your people why the organization must undergo continuous evolution."

According to the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, "All evolution, cultural as well as biological, is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseeable events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast." That sounds precisely like the situation facing today's companies. Indeed, from the bionomic viewpoint, the high-tech market economy is a fabulously complex, rapidly evolving ecosystem; a capitalist rain forest evolving at warp speed. Machine Age management precepts like stability and control are all but irrelevant in the Information Age rain forest.

To help make sense of life in this virtual rain forest, a new business language is emerging. Borrowed from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology, words like agility, responsiveness, learning, adaptation, food chain, niche, cooperation, communication, and intelligence are beginning to pop up in normal business conversations. The biological, or bionomic, mindset that flows from this language provides a new context for explaining why disruptive initiatives like TQM, reengineering, and organizational learning are so crucial to corporate survival.

Once the people in a company begin seeing themselves as members of an intelligent social organism that is struggling to survive on a rapidly evolving technological landscape, the critical competitive issues become clear: Are we as smart as our competitors? How can we learn to adapt faster? What can we do to raise our corporate intelligence?

In recent years scientists have concluded that intelligence isn't located in any particular neuron or patch of brain tissue. Biologists now refer to intelligence as an "emergent property" or a "systems effect." In humans, intelligence emerges from an incessant "neural conversation," millions of messages shuttling among 100 billion neurons linked by 100 trillion connections.

Apparently, the more nodes on a neural network and the more intricate its interconnections, the higher the potential intelligence. A squid neuron is practically indistinguishable from a human brain cell. We just happen to have a lot more of them wired together. Conversely, intelligence declines as portions of the brain are isolated from one another. Simply put, if you want higher intelligence, you've got to have better communication.

From his pioneering work on learning organizations, Analog Devices' chairman Ray Stata, has come to a similar conclusion. "Learning to work effectively in teams and groups, which is at the heart of organizational learning, is shaped by our ability to communicate. When you think about it, the only thing a manager does that is visible to the organization is to listen and speak, and to draw and interpret symbols. Speaking and listening are where it's at."

Indeed, if you look at what actually happens inside companies that manage to successfully implement TQM or reengineering, you invariably find radically improved internal communications. By breaking down the functional stove-pipes left over from Machine Age hierarchies and getting previously isolated portions of the corporate brain into communication with each other, business process redesign leads to breakthroughs in productivity and creativity. Cross-functional teams work in much the same way. Previously isolated pockets of know-how are brought to bear on problems that the mechanical organization had fragmented into unsolvable bits.

At AMEC Offshore, the big British engineering and construction firm, the cost of piping offshore oil platforms dropped 15% after intensive work on communications skills. According to consultant Michael McMaster, when he asked how the new approach to piping emerged, the lead supervisor said, "I've had the idea for eight years, but it's the first time all these people have been willing to listen to me -- and each other."

Until now, companies, like Motorola, that have had enormous success with quality initiatives, have done so without explicitly challenging the machine mindset or adopting a biological language. For other reasons, such firms already had cultures committed to honest, open communication. In these places, the concepts of quality and learning sprouted on fertile soil.

But for the great majority of firms where reform programs have failed, a direct challenge to "machine speak" and the culture it generates could open the path to progress. What may seem like a minor matter of semantics is, in fact, an insuperable obstacle to organizational learning. In most cases, unless the organization adopts a new language and mindset, one appropriate to the fast-evolving competitive terrain of the Information Age, that company will not be able to learn fast enough to survive.