You continue to impress this writer with your overall due
diligence, creativity, and enthusiasm!
Keep them coming! As your humble
servant reflects on your posts this week, he is pleased with your skills in
applying classic OD concepts from our course textbooks to course OD case
studies. You clearly have done your homework;
therefore, what follows in no way detracts from your hard work.
However, it is timely to share with you a
street-smart insight from an associate, friend of this writer. This friend earned his Ph.D. in Marketing
from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and set up his own marketing R&D
practice. It was a great success, and he
sold it several years ago to
retire.
Before he retired, however, we
teamed to do the marketing plan for a $9-million municipal telephone company
startup here in Wisconsin! Our fee for
the plan was $30,000, which we split in half.
After we finished the plan he told me something that I shall never
forget; I want to share it with you for it speaks to the subject matter of our
course, change management.
It is
this. “Craft the plan but never
implement it. It is during implementation, project management, that ‘all
hell breaks loose.’” You the planner can
protect yourself by saying, “Well, clearly, the project manager did not fully
grasp and implement the plan as
required.” This means the project
manager, not the planner, takes the blame for OD project misfires.
This is why it is wise to budget for outside
facilitators to implement OD plans, not you, the planner. Some of you mention hiring such persons to
drive your OD projects; your professor wants to alert you to the “political”
value of this move. It buffers you, the
planner, from OD change, project implementation failures.
Do not feel you must “lead the OD charge.” Plan it; let somebody else take the “doing”
risks.
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