People-focused knowledge management

Understanding the Situation
The executive team decided that Asterix needed to address all 
five issues and that they needed to work quickly. They decided 
that the situation was principally a result of senior management
failure and that they themselves, including Ken Haas, were respon-
sible. Now they needed to decide what to do. They agreed that 
they needed to be positively proactive instead of taking a negative
reactive course.
Since time was of the essence and the problems were systemic, it
was decided to pursue changes vigorously — as a major shakeup —
and perhaps bring about a new corporate direction. They needed to
determine what could be done quickly and at the same time start
immediately to correct or improve what needed more time. However,
they still needed to decide explicitly why and how they needed to
change. They started by considering the five issues, but first they
agreed that all signs pointed to four general problems:
1. Asterix’s intended strategy, operational mode, and practices had
not been understood by the rank-and-file and were therefore
not being implemented effectively.
2. Both Asterix management and its rank-and-file had distanced
themselves too far from their customers and did not understand
customer thinking and attitudes sufficiently well.
3. Customers believed that the attitudes and mentalities of Asterix
employees were not “good enough” to provide the service levels
customers required — partly because of a lack of a common
Asterix esprit de corps and partly because the employees lacked
integrative understanding of Asterix’s business and operations.
4. Whereas Asterix’s executive management encouraged indepen-
dence and distributed decision making, it was clear that the
direction of work in many parts of the organization deviated
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from the enterprise’s intended strategy, operational mode, and
practices. Moreover, much work was performed that did not
contribute directly — or at all — to implement Asterix’s strat-
egy and intents.
There were other issues as well, but the executive team decided to
narrow the focus and initiate actions as soon as possible by creating
a very demanding program that would be given the highest priority,
requiring the other issues to be postponed or canceled.