Clearly the interpretation of the mission by each camp was further distorting and inflaming the situation. The process of mission clarification took almost three days to resolve. That session ranked as one of the most difficult of my consulting career. Getting a group of hardheaded, know-it-all, arrogant people with radically different views to agree to the interpretation of a single-sentence mission statement is close to a harrowing experience.
This is a classic story of a production plant not having clarity of its mission. Was it a custom job shop, a standard production line, or a combination of both? The story is further confused when the focus was split. The company was trying to be customer-intimate and operationally excellent at the same time, giving each focus equal weight. The only way a split focus works is in textbooks and in managerial dreams. There is no such thing as equal weight given two diametrically opposing forces. Customer intimacy and operationally excellent processes will invariably clash when they meet at your operational team level. This is because your story is incongruent. You cannot give away product and be operationally excellent. You can’t deliver propane in the middle of the night and not charge for it if you are an operationally excellent company. If you are a customer- intimate company you cannot ignore your customer when she runs out of propane on the top of Bald Mountain in the middle of the winter’s worst blizzard. An operationally excellent company that thought it was customer-intimate wrestled with this problem for days. It wasn’t a pretty scene at the management meetings when the two opposite advocates collided. Naturally, the consultants picked up the rhythm and carried it right into the strategic planning meeting.