| As a general rule, critics are concerned with individuals. But when you do sociology, you learn that men and women are indeed responsible, but what they can or cannot do is largely determined by the structure in which they are placed and by the position they occupy within that structure (Pierre Bourdieu). In 2008,David, amember of“Kimono’s”(pseudonym) board of directors, invited me to improve the firm’s poor performance. Kimono is an Israelifirmthatdevelopsmarine products for an export to West Europa and Japan. At the time the consulting process took place, two business groups owned Kimono, Adventure (51%) and Genesis (49%). The roots of the company’s poor performance, according to David (pseudonym), were in John and Bill’s “stubborn personality” and ineffective communication. John was the head of Kimono’s agriculture farm that produces the marine products and Bill was the head of marketing.My consulting role was to help John and Bill develop better interpersonal communication in order to improve Kimono’s poor performance. As common among Organization Development (OD) practitioners, I conducted interviews with John and Bill and with all Kimono’s participants (six board members and five marine biologists). OD is a conceptual and practical field that focuses on organizational change. The interviews indicated that John and Bill’s interpersonal communication was indeed ineffective. However, from the interviews I also learned that the roots of Kimono’s poor performance were mainly the constant power struggles between Adventure and Genesis, the two business groups that own Kimono. These struggles, I found, started years ago with fights over issues such as Kimono’s ownership and shares, strategic direction, necessary capital investment and main operational processes. The interviews also showed that the board members, fully comprised of Adventure and Genesis’ owners, are deeply involved in Kimono’s everyday management and were using John and Bill as a way to achieve each owner group’s specific benefits. At this point, my impression was that the struggles within the board, and not John and Bill’s interpersonal communication, as David believed, were in large measure responsible for Kimono’s poor performance |
