In today’s marketplace, the need to aggressively manage the bottom line in unavoidable.  But there are creative ways to meet this challenge that can enable organizations to sharpen strategy, realign resources, engage employees, stimulate innovation, and identify new paths for revenue growth. CFAR has extensive experience working with organizations to help them weather the short-term crisis — and emerge more focused, more resilient, and positioned for success.

We invite you to review our articles and papers addressing these topics.

 

Briefing Note: The Timing and Depth of Cuts

The decisions surrounding the timing and depth of cuts are difficult.  Is a single, quickly taken, deep cut the best approach, or is a slow, more careful process less destructive to the long-term health of the overall enterprise? This article focuses on how to approach downsizing as the leading edge of a transformation, not simply as a business cycle problem.

Briefing Notes: The Downsizing Dilemma: Leadership in the Age of Discontinuity

Today’s managers, many of whom must cope with cutback situations, need new skills in order to plan and manage downsizing in ways that minimize damage to their employees and businesses, and that create opportunities to enhance their companies’ abilities to adapt to new challenges with new approaches. This article suggests that the key issues that arise during downsizing are in fact dilemmas, rather than problems which can be solved through analysis.  By understanding issues such as communication, participation, leadership and cuts as dilemmas, managers can appreciate both “sides” of the quandary in each circumstance, and use a “both-and” rather than an “either-or” approach to work through the dilemma. The reality is that in the downsizing process, managers must both reveal and conceal, lead and mobilize, consider alternatives and reduce options, balance acting and waiting.

Leading the Health Care Enterprise in Uncertain Times

The current recession has created a perfect storm of pressure on the nation’s already stressed health care system.  Decreased access to capital, a rise in charity care, flattening reimbursement and a decline in both inpatient and outpatient volumes can obscure opportunities for for organizational transformation.  This brief piece summarizes CFAR’s approach to helping healthcare organizations weather the current crisis while building organizational resilience and capacity for sustainable quality improvement.

 

Meeting Today’s Higher Education Leadership Challenges

Shrinking endowments, declining giving, increased need for financial aid, decreased research funding and dwindling state appropriations have created a real strategic dilemma for colleges and universities nationwide.   In response, institutions large and small, public and private, are engaged in sweeping spending cuts and freezes on hiring and construction.  The crisis, though, creates an opportunity for academic leaders to sharpen focus, recalibrate priorities against available resources, and build efficiency in sustainable ways.  This brief note describes ways CFAR can help higher education institutions stabilize the bottom line while preserving core assets and planning for a stronger future.

 

Considering the Core Program in Layoff Decisions

This chapter from "Cutting Back" provides guidance on how to anticipate, plan, implement, and manage retrenchment so that cutting back doesn't demoralize program staff, embitter clients, reduce productivity, or limit an organization's capacity to innovate.

 

Getting Cost Out—Reducing Management Costs

As a way of reducing costs quickly, healthcare providers have often “legislated” short-term budget cuts from the top down.  This method is quick, but can divert attention from important redesign opportunities and create short-term results that are not sustainable. This article describes how a large teaching hospital was able to cut millions in costs in a way that sustained cultural values, supported reengineering efforts already underway, and enabled organizational learning.

 

Briefing Note: Use of Idealized Design in Administrative Redesign and Downsizing

A medical school needed to take out 10 percent of the budget on an annualized basis. A committee was charged with using this challenge to rethink the way business was done, rather than as status preserving across the board approach. The use of idealized design helped free the group of assumed constraints, clarifying what was ideal and what was actually feasible, which allowed them to move forward with a mixture of strategies to achieve the specified target.

 

Briefing Note:  Tactics for Dealing with Denial and Confusion

Change —especially of the kind that can follow downsizing and restructuring in response to economic pressures—often stirs up anxiety and irrational hopes and fears.  People typically respond to change through the defense of denial, followed by confusion.  This article identifies several specific tactics for helping employees work through these emotions and accept a new reality.

 

Briefing Note:  Reflections on Disappointment in Organizational Transformations

The process of organizational transformation inevitably stirs up hope.   Leaders set forth a vision or dream of a new reality that is a significant contrast with the current state of affairs.  The “old way” can easily be labeled as “bad,” and the “new way” as “good.”  This splitting has the effect of both underattending to historical strengths or values that should be sustained, and underattending to the downside of the new way.  This article describes the need for leaders to balance both to engage employees in a new direction.