Let’s play a fantasy role playing game….imagine that you are the new MD or CEO of an organisation…..it is your first day in the job.  What do you want to see as you walk around the organisation’s offices; people busy working and doing what the organisation does or people sitting doing nothing?

I suspect that you would want to see some action; this would give you confidence that you have taken over an organisation that is staffed by people who are themselves confident, it would give you a benchmark of peoples productivity and it would make it less likely that you’d look at people and wonder whether you could lay them off without too much pain.

Which brings me to the question that I have to ask; Why is it that so often the first “action” of corporate management when there is going to be (or is) a new MD or CEO is to down tools and put everything “on hold”?

“Doing nothing is often worse than doing something”….

….is lesson #10 in Nigel Paine’s TZ “most read” blog “Learning lessons from West Ham’s relegation and this would seem to be the pertinent message here as well.

Some years ago I was involved with an organisation that had instigated a cultural and structural change program.  The CEO reached retirement before it was completed.  In the lead up to his departure several significant projects within the program were put “on ice” pending the arrival of the new guy.  Within a week of his arrival he hit the roof at the inertia of the managers who had delayed things and several were shown the door shortly afterwards.