Hone

Chapter 12Widening the Lens

 

Our chef friend Flannery has chosen – and honed – her career wisely. She has created a life that she enjoys for a multitude of reasons: She practices a craft that she loves, she gets to invent and experiment, she mixes up whom she interacts with on any given night, and as a sole proprietor she can say “no” when she wants to. She has control. Beyond menu and clientele choices, she chooses which knives to use for what purposes and makes sure they are always honed. This is the beauty of working in an environment where you have one ultimate decision‐maker, one elemental purpose, and one set of tools to work with. Plop Flannery (or any chef) down in a communal kitchen with shared utensils, shared equipment, and varying opinions on recipes and desired outcomes and it's a different game altogether.

Our focus up until this point has been to explore honing within single organizations. Intra‐organizational challenges are characterized by the existence of a single leader, the CEO, who is ultimately responsible for all decisions made within that organization. She has the power to act as the “chief systems designer,” shaping the formal and informal structures, processes, and incentives that guide employee behavior. Up to now, we have discussed situations where there is one elemental purpose and one collection of management systems to incentivize desired behavioral outcomes.

We want to turn our attention now to applying the same concepts to multi‐organizational ...