making our playgrounds a safer place,’ Cheryl says. ‘We’re helping people instead of them just getting into fights,’ adds Carrie…. The conflict managers, who have been patrolling the school’s playground since March 8, are not supposed to try to solve problems themselves, take sides or break up fights. Instead, they’re taught to ask the children involved how the problem can be solved, how to avoid future fights and attempt to get an agreement from everyone involved.” What marvelous Above The Line behavior! How would schools today change if kids on all our playgrounds helped children talk rather than fight, encouraged those with conflicts to find their own solutions, and identified conflict as something that does not need to mar school life?
All these examples appeared in the news on April 15, 1993. As you read or watch the news today, look yourself for examples of people reaping or failing to reap the benefits of accountability. It won’t take long for you to see the need for The Oz Principle in virtually every corner of American life.
PREPARING TO CLIMB THE STEPS TO
advantage CPI once owned as the technology leader was going up in smoke.
At this juncture Jay Graf, a former military officer, came on the scene as COO of the organization, joining Dr. Robert Hauser, then CEO, in an effort to regain competitive advantage. Jay Graf recalled describing the company as “an organization going 90 miles per hour on an icy road headed toward a cliff because no one is willing to take responsibility for the situation, and, worse, no one really understands how bad things are.” Despite all the clear signs of the company’s precarious competitive situation, many people in the organization focused on “coping with growth” as its biggest problem, unwilling to recognize or acknowledge the impending product development chal- lenges that could easily knock them Below The Line. Jay could foresee the competition’s eventual rise to unquestioned market leadership just two years down the line, and he feared that their continuous in- troduction of high-quality new products into the market would create a game of “leap frog” that would keep CPI in a defensive posture and render its products “also-rans” as soon as they hit the market.
To meet the challenge of this situation, Jay began instilling a new sense of confidence in the organization by focusing the company on new product development. At a time when many people in the com- pany thought that another acquisition funded by parent company Eli Lilly would solve the problem, Jay was resolute: there were not going to be any more therapeutic or resuscitative acquisitions. CPI will stand or fall through its own efforts. We’re going to get off the Lilly cash crutches. Jay and the management team then implemented cross- functional product development teams staffed by people from all parts of the company, which refocused on shortening product development cycles and further defined individual accountabilities.
As Wheelwright and Clark observe:
One of the most striking advantages of the heavyweight team is the ownership and commitment that arise among core team members, enabling tough issues to be addressed and major challenges to be overcome in a timely and effective fashion.
Identifying with the product and creating a sense of esprit de corps motivates team members to extend themselves and do what needs to be done to help the team succeed.
Jay and his team also implemented frequent project review meetings
which provided more timely coaching and guiding of product devel- opment teams. In addition, they put into effect a new system of suc- cession planning which distinguished between “players,” who accepted accountability for results, and “skaters,” who routinely fashioned ex- cuses for poor performance. Ultimately, they involved the entire company in a process of organizational transition which focused the company on changing the corporate culture from one characterized by “finger-pointing, confusion, and complacency” to one noted for
“accountability and ownership.”
As a result, today people at CPI operate Above The Line with a steadfast concern for new product development. Each person, in every function, understands that he or she must work together for the company to achieve its vision of “revolutionizing the world’s approach to cardiac arrhythmias.” CPI’s higher level of accountability stimulated strong initiative and commitment throughout the organization. In Jay Graf’s words, “Any project worth doing involves risk in the unanticipated. In my mind, part of what differentiates organizations that compete with one another is how each deals with and responds to the unanticipated. We still drop balls, but when the ball is on the ground, people don’t stand around with their hands in their pockets wondering who is going to be the first to bend over and pick it up.
When the unanticipated does happen, and the ball hits the ground, people are diving for it.”
Everyone at CPI strives to affect the product development cycle in a positive way. For example, the Regulatory Group, needing to meet a very tight deadline, accelerated the timetable to complete Pre-Market Approval (PMA), a series of documents, required by the FDA, that can sometimes grow to over four feet high. Such documents would typically take many months to complete and submit. However, the Regulatory Group, knowing that it needed to shorten the cycle time of this particular submission to introduce a new product on time, put in 24 hour days, with one team writing during the day, another team proofreading and correcting all night, and a third team rewriting as necessary early the next day. Long hours for everyone were not un- usual.
As an organization that operates Above The Line, people at CPI now feel confident that new product development will fuel future growth and return the company to market leadership, even though they still face enormous challenges.