Two models for going forward: Choose one

If you follow my personal blog you may have seen the diagrams below, but I think they deserve some extra notice for the classifieds and advertising professionals who look in on ReinventingClassifieds.com (and don’t see my more general media musings). They come from retired management consultant Frank Pecarich, who has been watching the newspaper industry’s struggles with incredulity. He writes:

“There is something terribly wrong with the management and executive decision making model for most newspapers. The correction process (action research model) calls for an appropriate management system response to an accurate critique of the management system or process. In the management literature as well as in my experience, it is clear that those organizations who fail to ‘correct course’ after receiving clear indications from the market to correct themselves, ultimately fail. This is happening almost daily as newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

Pecarich first shows with this diagram what a change-resistant organization looks like.

This probably is a good graphic representation of not just many newspaper companies, but also specifically their classifieds operations. External pressures continue slowly mounting and chipping away at the business while that catastrophic change-radically-now-or-die point is somewhere in the future.

Now here’s what you want to look like, says Pecarich:

The situation looks so much more manageable when companies respond to each significant change in the environment within a reasonable time frame, versus letting multiple warning signals mount until the situation is so dire that it’s insurmountable.

Can you get your company onto this rational change progression?