Abstract
It was 5 a.m. on March 15, 1998, at the start of the first shift when Dan Ariens, son of the chairman and great-grandson of the founder of Ariens Company, walked through the main factory greeting employees.1 Ariens is a mid-size manufacturer of outdoor power equipment for consumer and professional use, producing snow removal and lawn care products while employing over 1,000 people. Dan was taking over as president, and everyone knew him. He had grown up and gone to high school with most of the workers, labored on the production floor during his college vacations, and held several positions in management. Five years earlier, he had moved to Indiana to run the Stens company, a division of Ariens and an international supplier of parts for outdoor power equipment. While he was gone, the company had been through a series of changes led by a new president who brought with him a team of senior managers that aggressively ramped up production and dealer bookings. Unfortunately, Dan Ariens’ homecoming was not the story of an heir returning to take over a profitable, privately owned business.
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Notes
The information about and descriptions of Ariens Company in this chapter are taken from research and case studies supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (under agreement number FA8650–05-2–5706) and a consortium of other government and aerospace industry members. Telephone calls, a visit to Ariens operations in Brillion, Wisconsin, and discussion with Ariens managers included their review and approval of the case study working paper. Papers associated with these research activities include J. Hartwell and G. Roth, “Ariens Company: A lean enterprise change case study,” unpublished working paper, Lean Aerospace Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, August 4, 2006; J. Hartwell and G. Roth, “Doing more with less at Ariens: a leadership and transformation case study,” Organization Management Journal, 7 (2010), 89–109;
and G. Roth and J. Hartwell, “Comments on ‘Off the rails: understanding the derailment of a lean manufacturing initiative,’” Organization Management Journal, 7 (2010), 135–140.
In 2008, a McKinsey survey of 3,199 executives around the world found that only one transformation in three succeeds. Source is C. Aiken and S. Keller, “The irrational side of change management,” McKinsey Quarterly 2 (2009): 100–109.
Similar statistics were found by R. T. By, “Organisational change management: A critical review.” Journal of Change Management 5 (2005), 369.
Specific statistics taken from quote, “Between 1999 and 2005, productivity increased over 200%, inventory turns improved over 300%, safety incidents had been halved (from their 2001 peak), sales increased over 200%, and profits improved by a factor of 10,” in J. Hartwell and G. Roth, “Doing more with less at Ariens: a leadership and transformation case study,” Organization Management Journal 7 (2010), 93.
J. Womack, D. Jones, and D. Roos, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production: Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 13.
J. MacDuffie and S. Helper, “Creating lean suppliers: The Honda way,” California Management Review 39 (1997), 123.
J. MacDuffie and S. Helper, “Creating lean suppliers: Diffusing lean production through the supply chain,” in Liker, J. M. Fruin, and P. Adler (eds.), Remade in America: Transplanting and Transforming Japanese Management Systems, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 160.
J. Pfeffer and R. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 15.
Collins’ nine well-known management practices are 1) having outspoken industry as well as company leadership, 2) linking executive pay to company performance, 3) developing well-articulated, long-term strategic plans, 4) focusing on “what to do,” 5) using technology to drive change, 6) igniting transformation with mergers and acquisitions, 7) focusing management team efforts on motivating and aligning people, 8) creating revolutionary tag lines, launch events, and programs for transformation, and 9) repositioning the company into promising, high-growth industries. See J. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, (New York: Harper Business, 2001).
Los Angeles Times, “Dilbert’s creator strikes a believable pose in hoax” November 16, 1997, downloaded from http://articles.latimes.com/p/1997/nov/16/news/mn-54489 on March 26, 2009.
De Geus calculates the average life expectancy of Fortune 500 firms to be 40 years, or about half the average life expectancy of human beings (Arie De Geus, The Living Company [Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997]).
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© 2015 George L. Roth and Anthony J. DiBella
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Roth, G.L., DiBella, A.J. (2015). Systemic Change. In: Systemic Change Management. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412027_1
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