We are Mitchell and Company, a management and financial consulting firm located in the Boston area that regularly works with over 150 leading companies to help them improve their business performance. We have created and continue to lead several cooperative learning organizations such as OUTSTANDING CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICERS, LEADING CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICERS, SHARE PRICE GROWTH 100 and LEADING DIVISION PRESIDENTS 100. We are very interested in developing new methods for improving companies' economic performance and exploring the most promising areas which will lead to this because that is our passion. We love helping others, and have found this area to be a good way to serve others.
For nearly two decades, our chairman, Don Mitchell, and president, Carol Coles, have worked to develop new measurements for business effectiveness. By creating these new measurements, the path is eased to locating the best practice, the theoretical best practice, and monitoring progress to ensure prompt and rapid progress. Little happens until the new measurements are defined.Our firm is also good at making qualitative observations, finding a quantitative expression of those observations, and extracting qualitative lessons from the data. This enables us to make effective measurements, learn from them and help companies enjoy more benefits. The importance of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches is that many more issues can be resolved, and the insights can be more readily understood by many more people. As a result, the effectiveness of the approach is much higher than can be done with solely qualitative or quantitative tools.
The members of our cooperative learning organizations are among the leaders of top-performing companies who meet on a regular basis to collaboratively develop ways to improve their companies' performance. The organizational meetings provide these leaders with a learning environment conducive to sharing and discussing their ideas and experiences as executives in leading companies. Our goal is to help them expand their companies' activities toward the theoretical limits of best practice by developing new measurements and ways to look at what is happening in business. This is a new concept in management, and one that will become very important in the future.
For instance, one of our organizations, SHARE PRICE GROWTH 100, is the oldest and largest stock price improvement organization in North America. At each meeting our members explore current issues concerning stock price improvement and look at what other successful companies have done to improve their stock price. They discuss what factors may have been involved and use these sessions to generate new ideas. The meetings are also aimed at identifying the potentially most valuable questions that will lead to rapid progress in stock-price improvement.
Members recently looked at how to educate senior management about their role in improving the company's stock-price. We wanted to see how educational factors played out within those companies that showed the most stock-price growth. Important findings were reported and discussed at subsequent meetings and helped generate new questions and ideas to explore.
Carol and Don have also studied what they like to call the "arrested development of civilizations." They have observed that many of the great breakthroughs in economic progress that have helped companies could have occurred much earlier in history, with the subsequent benefits to all of humanity also available sooner and to more people. You can link to some of the examples we have already mentioned that involve moveable type and penicillin. We feel that business advances can be greatly accelerated by focusing on the most effective ways to make on-going major changes in companies' performance.
Enormous gains await us as companies and individuals whenever we look for them and ask the better and different questions. Important new directions in business thinking often come from new ways of perceiving business and new ways of measuring what is happening in business. We believe that one right question we should ask now is how companies can make 400 years of progress in 20 years, using the knowledge and technology that we have available today. We also feel it is important to measure what 400 years worth of benefits will look like in a number of areas.
One of the reasons we are so interested in companies is that we feel they provide the most effective means to make progress happen for all of humanity. We see companies as important vehicles for progress because they are able to make bigger, faster and more effective changes than governments or individuals. Individuals can make great changes for themselves, but it takes more than an individual to make and implement huge changes. There are certain kinds of changes that need more than one individual for them to occur. Even Einstein's great ideas took more than Einstein to implement them. A single runner cannot outrun a relay team.
Companies are the format in which people work together to be the most economically productive. There may be other, more effective formats, but thus far, this is what we have come up with. A company's productive output also greatly affects individuals, not just a company's profits. For instance, society can come up with better ways of developing beneficial pharmaceuticals and making them readily available to people. Change is truly positive when everyone can benefit from the goods and services that businesses produce.
We feel that many companies need to change some of their key beliefs about the world. Again, this is a matter of demonstrating ways that people can change the ways they think about progress. For instance, we need to change the idea that causes all of us to underestimate the size of potential markets and focus on the potential scope of their products and services too narrowly. We need to think in terms of much larger markets. Henry Ford recognized this when he saw that it would be futile to produce so many automobiles if few people could afford to purchase them. He thus increased his workers' wages to an amount which would make it possible for them own their own cars. This project is in the interest of both humanity and business. These do not conflict with each other but are interdependent. Business and society are thus in a process of making history together.
We plan to use the first 20 years to research these ideas and deploy them as rapidly as they are understood and then another 20 to fully implement them with a broader number of companies. During the research phase we will be formulating and testing hypotheses. Our goal is to better understand change so that we can learn to speed up the time it takes for positive changes to be implemented.
We want to stress that we ourselves are funding this project because we feel it will help the world make greater economic and social progress. We feel this research will make an important contribution to society. No one is paying us to do this. While we may need to generate financial support in the future to help fund additional research, our primary goal is to carry through a project that we feel has great value potentially for everyone. We are quite certain that the results of this study will be used successfully by thousands in the years to come.
As experience, communication, and education and among people are some of the most important areas we are looking at, we recognize that we must also be aware of how we ourselves communicate as an organization and interact with others. We are extremely concerned about communicating our ideas in the positive way we intend them so that misunderstandings do not block progress. Our goal is to be as sincere and honest as possible about our intentions and mission.
Again, we intend to research ways that companies can make 20 times faster economic progress. We believe that this will allow everyone to enjoy greater economic and social benefits much faster. We feel this is a way that we can make an important contribution to society and have the desire to learn more about how humans can improve the world for themselves by working to eliminate things which impede progress.
We want you to help us with these efforts because we need your ideas and stories to guide our research. We want to learn more about examples from the past and present where people could have made great economic and social progress but did not because of social factors. We want examples that you know of, particularly within your company, when you have made enormous economic progress by eliminating things which impeded progress or adopted a new way of thinking about progress.
For instance, Intel decided to produce its microchips by designing the next several generations of microchips simultaneously. This replaced the standard means of producing sequentially and not focusing as much on the future.
We feel that you will also gain a great deal from participating. We plan to share the results of our research as they become available. While this is something we plan to provide to everyone for free, we will have to charge for helping companies who wish more assistance to implement what we learn. This is because we are funding this project ourselves and have limited resources that are best focused on basic research.
We have planned a scholarly approach in citing ideas and giving appropriate credit for their use. In working on this project, we recognize that we probably have left out important ideas or may have used wording that miscommunicated our intentions. For this we apologize ahead of time. If there are ideas on this site that seem inappropriate, we sincerely hope you'll let us know. Good communication is the most important thing which will allow us to create and maintain a positive relationship with you in the following months and years.
To learn more about Mitchell and Companyâs suggestions for faster corporate progress, visit our new web site at www.mitchellandco.com
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