The 2011 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize
The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the author of the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2009 to summer 2010.
Topics
The Winner:
John Shook
Industrial anthropologist and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute
Author of:
“How to Change a Culture:
Lessons from NUMMI,”
Winter 2010, Volume 51, Number 2, pp. 63-68, Reprint 51211
This year’s winner is John Shook for his marvelous and lively recounting of the history of one of the most successful large-scale, directed organizational changes in recent times. Shook is an industrial anthropologist who played an active role in the change effort and provides both a memoir and crisp set of guidelines in “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI.” The change effort he describes is the famous GM-Toyota partnership at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI). It turned a spectacularly underperforming, downright dysfunctional auto plant in Fremont, California, into a model manufacturing operation using the same workers. The turnaround is most frequently attributed to the power of the famed “Toyota production and management systems” (the prototype of lean manufacturing), but Shook carefully narrates a rather different story highlighting the slow and somewhat piecemeal cultural change efforts that occurred at NUMMI. Shook emphasizes not corporate mandates aimed at changing minds but the implementation of work processes that shifted decision rights in the company and changed behavior: “Start by changing what people do rather than how they think.”
This is a classic organizational change effort following precepts put forth by Richard Beckhard some 40 years ago. The focus is on company-employee relationships and the trust (or lack thereof) that accompanies such ties. Beckhard’s signature focus in the change efforts he studied was on how trust is generated and maintained across segments, both vertical and horizontal. Although NUMMI closed its doors in 2010, it had nearly a 25-year run as one of America’s most successful manufacturing plants. John Shook’s account of the reasons behind such success should be required reading for anyone concerned with planned organizational change and just how culture — in its various guises — plays such an important role in these efforts.
This year’s panel included three distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty: Schussel Family Professor and Chair of the MIT Sloan Management Review Erik Brynjolfsson, senior lecturer in Information Technology Cyrus Gibson and Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management John Van Maanen.