Crossing Boundaries (again)

Last week I talked about the need to cross organisational boundaries - to avoid creating 'silo management' where each department takes decisions on its own information to suit its own ends - resulting in sub-optimal performance for the organisation.

This week I return to boundaries to use very briefly on whether approaches to improving businesses are, or should be, different in different geographic regions.

Different regions or nations may have different social, legal, economic, political and technological characteristics.  My own view is that these differences may influence the appropriateness of solutions we may devise, but they do not necessitate a different approach to the business improvement process itself.

I have worked in enough countries of the world - developed and emerging economies - to base this view on personal experience.

But businesses in different parts of the world work very much in the same way. To improve them we still have to work through a process that consists of the essential stages of diagnosis, development, evaluation, implementation.  Throughout this process, we may have to adjust how we communicate and explain, but we have to work through these steps.