Using Commitments to Manage Across Units

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A company’s installed business processes are typically designed to execute routine activities. As such, they can have great difficulty handling novel initiatives, particularly when important work needs to be coordinated across different business units. Such cases are often better handled by a new framework that views the organization as a nexus of personal promises that employees make to each other.

As defined by the authors, a "commitment" is a promise made by a performer to satisfy the concerns of a customer within the organization. "Customer" and "performer" refer simply to roles: An individual acts as a customer when making a request, and a performer when fulfilling a request. In committing to a customer, a performer promises to fulfill the customer’s "conditions of satisfaction," that is, the specific terms (such as cost, timing and quality) required to meet the customer’s needs. In general, the most powerful commitments are public, active, voluntary, explicit and motivated. Moreover, effective commitments tend to arise out of ongoing discussions between the customer and performer that proceed through four basic steps — preparation, negotiation, execution and acknowledgment.

Donald N. Sull is an associate professor of management practice with the London Business School. His most recent book is Made in China: What Western Managers Can Learn From Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). Charles Spinosa is group director with VISION, a business change consultancy based in Dublin. They can be reached at dsull@london.edu and cspinosa@vision.com.

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