clarity imperative at work

in his book "only the paranoid survived", andrew groove says "when the company is meandering, its management staff is demoralized. when the management staff is demoralized, nothing works: every employee feels paralyzed." sound like domino effect, isn't it? but this shouldn't be the case, he also said "you've just got to focus on excellence and try not to be distracted by the news and the rumors and the absurdities of the stories that were coming out.... your first task is to form a mental image of what the company should look like when you get to the other side."

in today's economic adversities, we heard of many companies doing their strategies just to cope up or to stabilize the trend. some doing downsizing, others call it rightsizing, but whatever they may call it, its the majority of working class heroes that are suffering.

this afternoon our department head scheduled a dialogue, he discussed the current trend of our company, economic status, some future goals and made a room for an open forum about employees' issues and some concerns. it is really important and i appreciated the effort of having an open discussion with the top management. i also believed that clarity imperative is truly important wherein all the employees are seeing the transparency and they are aware of any strategy. "clarity of direction, which includes describing what we are going after as well as describing what we will not be going after, is exceedingly important at the late stage of the strategic trasformation". everyone should be aware of the companies direction so that during the execution we could early react if that strategy will make us or the worst is will break us.

"Being an early mover involves different risks. Yet the consequences of being early are less onerous than the consequences of being late. If you're wrong, you will die, But most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don't commit themselves. The greatest danger is in standing still." - Andrew Groove (Intel CEO, circa '87)