PETERS, WATERMAN AND AUSTIN’S EXCELLENCE MODEL
Use this model to identify the features of an excellent organisation.
Tom Peters, Bob Waterman and Nancy Austin identified concern with the production of quality products as a fundamental feature of excellent companies.
THE EIGHT PREREQUISITES THAT ARE ESSENTIAL FOR MANAGING QUALITY ARE:
A bias for action: Encourage active decision making using cross-functional teams that include staff, customers and suppliers.
Staying close to the customer: An ability to identify what your customers want.
Autonomy and entrepreneurship: A willingness to foster innovation and nurture ‘quality champions’ throughout the organisation.
Productivity through people: A willingness to treat all employees as a source of quality and to respect, involve and empower them.
Hands-on, value-driven: Management should show its commitment to quality at all times and adopt a management philosophy that reflects this.
Stick to the knitting: Stay close to the business that the organisation knows about and has expertise in.
Simple form, lean staff: Develop simple organisational structures with a minimum of senior staff.
Simultaneous loose-tight properties: Allow self-governing, free-flowing organisation forms with risk taking (the loose) combined with meeting targets and protecting core values (the tight) as a prerequisite.
In 1985, Peters and Austin summarised their thinking on excellence as a concern for customers, a willingness to innovate, a well-motivated staff and a management and leadership consumed with a passion for excellence.
HOW TO USE IT
- Listen to your customers. Get to know them and what they want. Be sensitive to their changing needs and seek to deliver what they want before they even ask for it.
- Establish a cross-functional team with representatives from staff, customers and suppliers to examine how your service to customers can be improved.
- Remember your customers may be internal or external.
- Support innovation and enterprise in the organisation. Identify and nurture those people who have a passion for excellence and want to improve quality throughout the organisation.
- See all employees as a potential source of quality and unlike the typical hard-nosed task-centred manager (see Theories 12 and 13) treat them with respect. Involve them in decision making and empower them to do their job. Do this, and productivity and quality will improve.
- Show your commitment to quality at all times and adopt a management philosophy that reflects this. Be a ‘hands-on boss’ not an ‘absent landlord’ (see Theories 17–19).
- To get the most from staff encourage them to use their discretion within clearly defined parameters. Provided they act in good faith never criticise staff for trying and failing.
- Stick to what you know best.
- Keep organisational structures and systems simple. It’s complexity that causes cock-ups.
- Allow staff to exercise their discretion within wide but clearly defined bounds.
QUESTIONS TO ASK
- Who are my customers?
- What are their true needs and expectations?