Dumping Mr. Edsel

[Drucker]: …Thirty-odd years ago I began to counsel that you should build organized abandonment into your system. It follows the old line that it makes more sense for you to make obsolete your own products than to wait for the competitor to do it. But this is very hard for organizations to do. The internal resistance is great. They have to be forced. Remember the Edsel? After eighteen months the Ford Motor Company announced that it was abandoning the Edsel. I think we all roared with laughter. We had already abandoned the Edsel. The Ford Motor Company just took a hell of a long time to accept it.
[Schwartz]: Why is it that so many organizations, even in the United States, have such a high resistance to that process of systematically abandoning their past and building a future?
[Drucker]: One reason is ignorance. People do not know that you cannot successfully innovate in an existing organization unless you systematically abandon. …
(Peter Drucker, “Post Capitalist,” interview with Peter Schwartz, Ju/Au 1993) [emphasis added]

Managing for innovation. Peter Drucker defines innovation as ‘change that creates a new dimension of performance.’ If we build innovation into how we structure the organization, how we lead the workforce, how we use teams, and how we design the ways we work together, then innovation becomes a natural part of the culture, the work, the mind-set, the ‘new dimension of performance.’ At the same time, we must practice ‘planned abandonment’ and give up programs that may work today but will have little relevance in the future.”
(“Managing in a World That is Round”by Frances Hesselbein, Leader to Leader, No. 2 Fall 1996) [emphasis added]

Yesterday’s post began with a quote from Peter Drucker about an organization becoming an Agent of Change. We noted that these Drucker quotes were cited by Frances Hesselbein in a 2005 book entitled Global Health Leadership and Management in the context of global health care reform. Ms. Hesselbein is the current chairman of Drucker’s Leader to Leader Institute, and closely associated with Bob Buford of the Leadership Network which has been connected with Rick Warren.

Hesselbein authored Chapter 10 of Global Health Leadership and Management, entitled “Leadership and Management for Improving Global Health.” This entire chapter is a treatise on the new gospel of organizational and leadership change. Hesselbein observes that: “Nowhere is change as rapid as in the field of health care.”

Hesselbein clearly sees the mandate for a “healthy global society” as a way to leverage monumental changes across the global spectrum. Below are just a few key excerpts from Hesselbein’s chapter that seem directly applicable to Rick Warren’s new health care “mission” for the Church as described in last Wednesday’s (9/27/06) Herescope.

“As leaders, we know that some of the practices of the past are not relevant to the present we are living and the future we envision. Nowhere is change as rapid as in the field of health care. So leaders of change will find the courage to throw out the old hierarchy, along with outmoded, irrelevant policies, practices, procedures, and assumptions that limit our ability to bring essential health care to all children, all families, all communities, and all countries.…

“…[W]e challenge the gospel of what is. We have the courage to challenge every policy, practice, and assumption; we challenge the status quo.…

“One of the most difficult tasks is “planned abandonment” – Drucker’s term…

“The day of the partnership is upon us. And if we share a vision – and our vision of the future is a country, a world of healthy children everywhere,…

“The power of mission, the power of example, the power of inclusion, the power of collaboration can move us from where we are to where are we determined to be. …It happens when all of us together all over the world mobilize around a common mission of bringing health care to our global family.…

“We are called to see change, never as a threat, but always as a remarkable opportunity to reach a new level of relevance, a new level of significance. …

It is all about leadership.…

“Today we are called to redefine leadership, just as we must redefine the organization.…”

It is disturbing to hear that Drucker’s concept of “planned abandonment” is being brought into the entire global health care reform agenda. Health care is supposed to be about human lives, human souls.

Perhaps the rest of the world doesn’t know what evangelical Christians already know – that Rick Warren has taken the organizational concept of “planned abandonment” and applied it to people! People in the pews who do not go along with his “redefined leadership,” “innovation” and a “redefined” organization (church) and its new “mission” are systematically abandoned at the doorstep. The purpose-driven management plan does that to people. Church-goers who challenge Rick Warren’s new status quo and new gospel of “what is” are tossed outside.

This systemic “planned abandonment” means a lot more than no longer selling Edsel’s, it may mean dumping Mr. Edsel in a global health triage that lacks the fundamental foundation of biblical ethics for caring, nurturing and protecting human life.

There is no indication that Rick Warren brings the Church into this 3-legged stool “partnership” with the intention of being salt and light to his 2 other partners, Corporate and State. Rather, his global mission is founded upon Drucker’s purely utilitarian model of the church as a “community” and a “delivery system” and “center” – a church devoid of its salt and light. And perhaps, in the end, when “obsolete” and “non-performing” baggage has been abandoned, devoid of true compassion for lives and souls.

The Truth:

“For thou has possessed my reins: thou has covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Psalm 139:13-14)