Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.66 2016.10.01 Takahashi Minoru

Gathering too many internal opinions will sink your system project

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.


“Asking employees for their opinions on company management”
I have never met a company president
I have never met a CEO who says this.


However,


"Asking employees for their opinions on the systems used at the company"
I do, unfortunately, occasionally hear
unfortunately, I do hear from time to time.


We are not in a position to offer opinions on corporate management, but
we believe that “in most cases, top-down implementation is essential” when it comes to systems,
and we would like to state that opinion here.


The company should make all decisions regarding the system, down to the finest details, on its own authority.
If we were to accommodate every whim of individual employees and customers,
we would be taking a step backward, creating an extremely complex system,
and I guarantee we’ll end up with a system that’s worse than doing things by hand with a calculator.


It’s fine to check in with them just to let off some steam.
Since the total number of customer interactions is inevitably greater among all employees than it is for the president alone,
it is true that some of the employees’ opinions contain valuable insights.


However, in such cases,
if you lower the bar for employees to voice their opinions too much,
those who have no idea what it takes to build up genuine effort will seize the moment to shout at the top of their lungs,
and the meeting descends into utter chaos—a “joke that isn’t funny.”
Rather than soliciting opinions and requests through an “open call,”
but rather through a bottom-up process that follows the company’s organizational chart and procedures—for example, from rank-and-file employees to managers to executives to the president—
in a bottom-up manner.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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