30
2. The 'culture' promoted by the senior executive or an equally
powerful culture carrier or group.
From the literature review it appears that the most potent of these two forces is the former. The reasons for this are not difficult to see and can perhaps be illustrated best by comparing this process to an individual's development.
Imagine the exasperated parents of a rebellious teenage son. They might try exhortation or a number of other strategies to get him to 'grow up' and 'act like an adult'. But clearly, growing up and becoming an adult can only be achieved in the fullness of time. Any adult -like behaviour the parents manage to induce in their offspring at this earlier stage is likely to be a veneer oflittle substance. They tend to forget that before this current stage of development, their son was in tum an adventurous toddler and a compliant child. These stages were not inherently better or worse than any other, just different.
Equally true, however, is the fact that the son cannot permanently live in some kind of time-warp and remain an eternal teenager, pleasant though the prospects of doing so might appear to him. Time passing and accrued experience are two factors that nobody (and that includes organisations), can sidestep and avoid.
Like the wise parent, the chief executive will recognise when his charge is ready to grow into another phase of development and will act accordingly, He will nottry to keep the .. growingorganisation.in the equivalent of short trousers, but nor will he rush into trying to make it into something that is impossible to attain at the time. As the literature has shown, organisations have their own built-in mechanisms for dealing with change. Often the culture carrier is not an agent for development, but merely an upholder of past tradition.
There are, of course, dangers in carrying analogies too far. Unlike individuals, organisations have the potential to renew themselves and in theory they could last forever. However, as none seem to be immortal, it was felt that this idea of stages of organisational development was well worth examining in more detail, especially in terms of how it correlated with the marketing planning processes of the company.
RESEARCH FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS Designing a measuring instrument
After much experimentation, an instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed. Since it was required to illuminate the organisational
31
context within which marketing planning operated, this instrument needed to have a reasonably 'well-graduated scale'. That is to say, one :.-_ which could, with some accuracy, distinguish between different shades " of organisational grey. Accordingly, it was the work of Greine~2 which provided the necessary degree of analysis and gave rise to the
questionnaire which we have subsequently called 'the organisational
development diagnostic'. .
With such an instrument available, it was then possible to proceed into the research, which comprised two phases:
1. application to the MBA case studies; and
2. wider application to companies to check the validity of the instrument to provide not only a diagnosis of the current situation, but also a prognosis about what issues needed to be addressed for future success.
Application to case studies
From an initial collection of some 50 case studies, which had been meticulously researched and written up for examination purposes by Cranfield MBA students, the researchers selected a sample of 34. These were chosen for further analysis because:
• they contained detailed information about the companies and the marketing planilirig-prucedureslireyused;'-' ----- --'--' --"-' ..
• they represented a broad cross-section of British industry in terms of the proportion of planners to non-planners; and
• they provided a wide spectrum in terms of company size, measured by the number of employees.
A breakdown of the research companies is provided in Table 4.2.
Assessing each company's stage of development against its approach to marketing planning provided the results shown in Table 4.3.
At a glance, it can be seen that planners are further along the biographical/maturity life line than semi-planners, who in tum lead non-planners. Equally, all planners appear to be experiencing a period of evolutionary growth.