Rocky Flats
The transformation of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production Facility in Colorado, United States into the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is one of the most dramatic turnarounds in organizational history. The facility was catapulted from utter disaster on every level to extraordinary success that went well beyond the predictions of even the most ardent optimists. Having been established in 1952 during the Cold War, much of the Rocky Flats workforce included multiple generations of employees. They held fierce pride in their sense of mission and the level of skill required to make nuclear weapons, which included working with the most dangerous substances on the planet. Despite this, the facility was riven with discord and distrust between the workers, represented by three different labor unions, and management. There were hundreds of grievances and complaints filed each year, and multiple safety violations recorded. The animosity did not stop at the razor wire fence surrounding the 800 buildings ironically situated on 6000 acres within a verdant valley in Colorado. The local community was openly antagonistic toward the facility and had been so for decades. Armed guards kept vocal protestors at bay, but not out of sight nor earshot. Hostilities were also regularly exchanged with government regulators and other Department of Energy sites throughout the country. In a word, acrimony, suspicion, and combativeness permeated almost every connection point inside and outside the facility. In 1989 the FBI raided and shut down the facility due to suspicions of undocumented pollution. The workers, who still had to report to work but had nothing to do, felt immediately stripped of their sense of mission and purpose. When the nuclear weapons program at Rocky Flats was permanently discontinued in 1992, morale was at an all-time low. It was determined by government regulators that it would take 70 years and $36 billion to “clean up the mess” at Rocky Flats.
However, Kaiser-Hill (parent company CH2MHill), the contracting company chosen to close Rocky Flats, applied principles and practices of sound organizational scholarship and ennobled, positive leadership, and instead of 70 years and $36 billion, the cleanup process at Rocky Flats took only six years and only $6 billion, and the Refuge became 13 times cleaner than was required by law. The plant workers, labor union representatives, management executives, community leaders, environmental activists, and government regulators were enabled to come together and were motivated to collaborate and cooperate in this massive redemptive process. Eventually they together envisioned and then created the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge – a place of life and abundance where once existed a nuclear weapons facility focused on death and destruction. Extraordinary, bottom-line results, indeed...and we shall see that these results are not On the other side of the world, both geographically and politically, the transformation of Saudi Telecom (STC) from a government-owned ministry to a for-profit private company was nothing short of astonishing. The Saudi Kingdom realized it needed to move from relying primarily on oil and gas resources for revenue to be a more digital based economy. The telecommunications ministry, completely controlled by the Saudi monarchy, was selected for the Kingdom’s first foray into privatization. Khaled H. Biyari was appointed CEO in 2015, and was hugely instrumental in the organization’s turnaround. In 2013, the McKinsey Consulting firm had given STC one of the lowest “organizational health” scores in the world – a 33 out of 100. By 2018, it had skyrocketed to a score of 71, the largest five-year increase in McKinsey history. Also in 2018, the Arabian Society for Human Resource Management named STC the “Best Talent Program in the Gulf” for its High Potential Development Program created for its employees.
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