Baker Reflection Paper free essay sample

Identify and discuss three key performance measurement lessons top management should learn and understand from Baker’s engine and transmission example. First of all, we can learn from this example is that manager cannot think the performance of whole is simple sum of the performance of each of the parts considered separately. One plus one is not makes two. One plus one is greater than two in Baker’s concept. Executives should view the system as a dynamic process. The each unit and individuals in system are interdependent and interact. Secondly, the traditional system of employee feed back and evaluate should be changed. Executives cannot just evaluate employee depend on individual performance but should evaluate employee as a person who associate with a whole organization and work in system. The thinking that each individual person and unit is urged to best so that the whole will become its best and the each individual will makes greatest contribution to the company is not rational. We will write a custom essay sample on Baker Reflection Paper or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Thirdly, the system of work post responsibility should follow with system management principle. In the traditional management concept, individual just deals with his â€Å" work† and just care about his â€Å"responsibility†. In the baker’s view, the responsibility of each individual should be relates to whole organization and whole system. 2. You have heard me describe the â€Å"Baker Model† as follows: Assumptions drive structure, structure drives behavior, and behavior drives results. A. What are the assumptions, structures, behaviors, and results that will likely follow from a MBO (Management By Objective) type of management philosophy? a. MBO Assumptions: Most company attempt to maximize the benefit of shareholder and put it to the first goal of organization. MBO (Manage by Objects) is the management philosophy that was generated by this goal. MBO’s primary assumptions is that managers define each individuals major areas of responsibility in terms Of results expected of him and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members based on the object of organization. b. MBO Structure: MBO philosophy will lead to profit-oriented organization that may have a central management structure. Management process based on MBO allocates their goal to the employees from the central top to the department then to the individuals. The first phase in the MBO process is to define the organizational objectives. These are determined by the top management and usually in consultation with other managers. After the organizational goals are defined, the subordinates work with the managers to determine their individual goals. c. Behaviors of MBO By understanding the psychology of human beings, these philosophies may easily result in certain employee behavior. People are more likely to be competitive rather than being cooperative with each other. They may be lack of creativity and just obey to the directions, acting like a machine without better ideas, aspirations, or reflections on their situation. Employees are highly stressed and won’t pay enough attention on establishing relationship with others, not to mention create interactions. They just care about themselves’ goals and benefits instead of the whole company’s healthy growth, let alone natural and social responsibility of the enterprise. For instance, if the process can lead to the result, there may be real best workers and worse workers. Only those best workers will be appreciated and get attention. Most of other workers will not be inspired because they feel they can never surpass those stars of the company. If the system have problems and never generate settled goals, all the workers may lose motivation to achieve the goals. That’s the failure of MBO philosophy unless the top managers can make the process work well by ignoring any other human intelligence from the employees. d. MBO Results Owners of the business widely accept the financial reports instead of human livelihoods as their standards of measuring performance of the operators. Thus, the operators have no incentive to spend unnecessary energy on any other objects. The performance measurement system is likely to measure how every component of the organization achieves the financial budgets that are settled by the top manager. For example, sales department may have their budget of sales, and achieve revenue goals; all the departments should control and meet their costs budget, which eventually aim to achieve the whole financial goals of the company. The performance measurement system may termly reward those who fulfill the goals and punish who cannot do it. It may have clear regulations toward each department’s financial responsibility nd the relevant stimulation policy. This consequently impact on every individual in the organization. The department managers will subdivided the department’s goals to everyone and measure individual performance as the same way how the top managers did to them. That creates an enterprise culture that everyone views economic activities increasingly and exclusively in terms of abstract quantitative variables. B. What are the assumptions, structures, behaviors, and results that will likely follow from a MBM (Management By Means) Type of management philosophy? . MBM Assumptions: MBM (Manage by Mean) holds the assumptions that business should be operated as the way natural system do. Everything in the natural system can be self-organizing and connected with others. Moreover, the interaction between those things can create diversity and sustainable development. The primary principle is that people should organize the enterprise as a whole system, understand the importance of system thinking and view everyone in an organization as the part of the system, in which people are self-orga nizing. The system also exist constant interactions among all self-organizing employees. The second assumption is that if the means is correct, the result must be positive. Thus, managers should pay more attention on the process instead of results, and do not need to manage their employees’ behavior precisely. In that way, they can take fully advantage of people’s creativity power and interactions effects. The managers can save energy in creating a healthier process to help employees establish mutually helpful relationship and work easier or more efficient. That’s the sustainable way company should develop their business to a new level. b. MBM Structure As our team discussed, because MBM do not lead to a clear â€Å"win or lose† measurement system, there must be a management structure that helps to figure out whose contribution is more than others to the whole system. We thought there should be a coordinating department between top manager and other departments. The coordinating department should promote the interactions among other departments, provide mutually communicating chance and measure the contributions that each department made to the whole system. It helps top executives to find the work relationships existing between departments and how they affect each other. To achieve the entire goal of the company, some department might need to sacrifice and those departments’ negative credit might increase the total benefit. These mutually help should be encouraged to provide after comprehensive understanding about the entire process of the production. This middle department provides people data about what the system needs as a whole, and provide performance report according to how people work with system thinking. . Employee behavior of MBM In an enterprise, in which MBM philosophy is implemented, workers are more likely to cooperate with others and full of ideas and vigor. They are also highly self-organizing and self-motivated. Employees will not ignore the existence of problems; on the contrary, problems will be reflected to the managers very fast and sometimes get fixed at the very beginning. Every component of the company is operated as one whole system and the sum of them might even be more than the whole. d. MBM Results As we discussed before, the middle coordinating department should make out an appropriate measurement system that can measure how components contribute to the whole system. For instance, after some conferences about everyone’s work difficulty, others may think about how they can cooperate and provide help to fix others’ problems. We can measure how department’s managers are willing to provide helps. Then we can measure how they fulfill their commitment. We also can measure how efficient those changes are made and how effective these interactions promote the system. In a word, we measure how fast people located problems and what they do in fixing the process. The performance measurement system cares more about means and process instead of results. If the process don’t lead to results, that’s unwise to punish the workers. Changing the systems and the means of work are the solution. 3. How would Baker’s key points and MBM approach have improved thee outcome in our red bead game? As we all know, if individual cannot make good performance, manager just simply give criticize to employee and ignore effects come from system. The goal of company is improve the performance of system. However, many managers just focus on how to improve the employee performance and have not realized the importance of system effect. If managers make efforts on redesign system and try to understand variation, if manager can figure out the interrelationship of people, market, method, equipment and environment not just separately deal with it, we can get lots of benefits and get great progress in term of system performance. Depending on above principles and assumptions, we can redesign the process of red bead game and modifier the method how to product white beads. With simply stimulate employee, give advance equipment and analysis market data cannot change the whole system. When manager can put all factors in whole system together to thinking, in this way, we can solve problem and improve the whole system in shortly.