Why Konica Minolta’s Boss Tore Down His HR Department’s Wall

[Anonymous]

Why Konica Minolta’s Boss Tore Down His HR Department’s Wall

After three decades of dispatching Japanese executives to run its Australian operations, Tokyo’s Konica Minolta last year promoted locally born David Cooke to run its printer business here. The transformation since has been physical as well as financial.

“Konica Minolta no longer wants to be a Japanese company operating in multiple countries. It wants to be a global corporation and there’s a big difference,” says Cooke, whose business in Australia is forecasting $220 million turnover this Japanese fiscal year (April 1 – March 31) and employs 500 people.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions’ first Australian-born managing director, David Cooke. Photo: Nic Walker

After 28 years in the printing business and eight as executive general manager at Konica Minolta Business Solutions Australia – where he was second in command to those Japanese salarymen on their four-year secondments – Cooke was promoted with a tacit licence to make changes and he did so from day one.

“The first I thing I did was not do something – move into the managing director’s office,” he told a recent Australian Graduate School of Management/GE Capital seminar as part of those organisations’ Mid-market Growth Alliance.

“It was a beautiful big office overlooking the [Sydney] CBD from North Ryde, but it was removed from the rest of the business. I turned it into a ‘quiet lounge’ for all staff, and moved into a glass-fronted office in a high-traffic area next to the lunch room,” he says.

From there he was able to “give 50 people a day a wave or a smile or a nod”, a strategic symbol that a less hierarchical culture had arrived than had existed under the old Japanese-style management.

“There are good things about Japanese corporate culture, it will look after you your entire career – but it demands that you sort of keep your head down and be very task-oriented,” Cooke says.

“My view is that human beings are a little more complex than that.”

Strategic renovation

The next bit of renovation was directed at the wall around the human resources department in what was elsewhere an open-plan office.

“The thinking had been that all sorts of secret things go on in HR and they need privacy. It was never my decision as EGM but I felt symbolically it was wrong. I had the facilities manager get someone in to tear the wall down within my first week as MD.”

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that the director of HR was soon on their way out too, let go by Cooke along with the incumbent general managers of finance and IT, as he rationalised the number of departments reporting through to them in the name of a more unified whole.

“There had been a culture where general managers felt they were running their own mini-companies . . . Replacing them with people who agree with moving to a more transparent, cohesive culture has allowed me to gain support from the workforce for my changes far more quickly.”

There was a hunger for transparency among workers anyway, as Cooke discovered after a staff survey produced more than 800 comments, most of them crying out for “the equivalent of basic human rights in the workplace . . . people just wanted to know how the company was going, and they’d never been told that before.”

Cooke now provides a detailed financial report to all staff every month, “the good, the bad and the ugly, so whether you’re beavering away at a workstation or you’re a technician out in the field repairing one of our multi-function printers, you know your contribution to the whole”.

Celebrating success

Successes can now be properly celebrated too, Cooke argues.

“Before it was like – ‘here’s a lunch to recognise the great quarter we just had, except I can’t tell you how great’.”

As you’d expect from a man whose doctoral thesis was subtitled Building social capital through corporate social investment, Cooke has also sought to build staff engagement via Konica Minolta supporting community causes.

Staff are now granted volunteering days off to support non-profit organisations they nominate – The Breast Cancer Network, The Smith Family, Landcare and Cooke’s “captain’s pick” of Project Futures, an organisation trying to stop the sex slavery trade into Australia.

Cooke’s simple theory that a less hierarchical structure would lead to more engaged staff, better customer service and better financial results may soon be proven right. Revenues for this Japanese fiscal year are already tracking “5 to 10 per cent higher month on month” than for the year commenced before his promotion, Cooke says.

“That’s in a market where overall revenues are down, and where there’s been no aggressive approach to win more tenders. It’s all been down to staff morale. If you get treated like a number by your employer, why are you going to go the extra mile for its customers?”

Cooke retains Linden Brown’s MarketCulture consultancy to assist in Konica Minolta Business Solution’s cultural transformation.

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October 2, 2014 at 11:24 AM