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Research
Zenith was formed first as a research organization,
and only later came to be a consulting one. Since our inception in 1962,
we have researched over 1200 organizations, 10,000 individuals and their
interactions, and 27 industries.
Overall Key Findings
- 85% of Wal-Mart's prices are higher than its competitors as a group
(based on nearly half a million price checks).
- 94% of business organizations have a critical problem they are not
solving.
- Over 97% of business improvement information is delivered in a format
that makes a significant difference in organizations only 2% of the
time: books, seminars, conferences, articles, and speeches.
- 92% of all business organizations have a customer service rate of
70% or worse.
- 100% of all businesses are 25% inefficient or worse: they waste at
least one dollar and one hour out of every four.
- Organizations cannot see the System that generates their most significant
errors, much less change it.
Commitment
Commitment is a poorly understood concept. We started
our study with this question: If so many people claim to be committed
to something, why don't they do the thing they are committed to?
- Commitment is what determines if we do something
or not. If we are committed to something, we do it; if we are not, we
don't.
- There are four elements that must
be present for commitment to occur:
- Benefit
- Importance
- Choice
- Confidence
- Business organizations almost always develop
compliance from staff, not commitment.
- Rewards and punishments (“carrots and sticks”)
cannot develop commitment, only compliance.
- Commitment cannot be forced or coerced.
- Advocacy of commitment requires internal relationships
few business organizations have.
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Wal-Mart:
How to Exploit Wal-Mart’s Weaknesses
We did nearly half a million
price checks in 300 Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, and national chain grocery
and drug stores to find out who really has lower prices.
- 85% of Wal-Mart's prices are higher
than its competitors as a group;
- Wal-Mart's main success-driver is that consumers
perceive its prices are lower, which they are not;
- Consumers perceive that Wal-Mart's prices
are lower because of a complex set of perception-altering mechanisms;
- Wal-Mart's core competence is not logistics
or low prices; it is perception-alteration: public relations;
- Real-world tests show that consumers can
be brought back to the other retailers only by addressing the alteration
of perceptions;
- Real-world tests successfully brought consumers
back to other retailers, and they stayed after 12 months.
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Critical
Problems: Every Organization Is in Danger but Doesn't Know It
In 1965, we established a database to track how
organizations process critical information. That database now includes
over 1200 organizations and 10,000 individuals and their interactions.
A statistical analysis of that data revealed
- 94% of organizations have a critical problem
they are not solving.
- Organizations do not know how severe their
problems are.
- An organization may not know of the existence
of their critical problems.
- An organization may have critical problems
that could end their organization or make them be absorbed, and not
know it.
- Management does not mainly control the fate
of the organization.
- The organization is unlikely to be as strong
or as excellent as it thinks it is.
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Long-term Health Care:
The Core Obstacle to Fixing Long-term Care’s Problems
A random sample of 300 long-term health care facilities:
a mix of urban and rural, for-profit and not, large and small, and assisted
living and skilled nursing facilities. Within the sample were six facilities
that had won some type of quality award.
- Resident surveys generate faulty data that
significantly overstates the quality of care. Facilities’ quality
is significantly lower than the facilities’ measurements indicate.
Resident surveys are not a reliable quality-measuring device.
- Facilities’ processes are inefficient,
and the tracking systems that monitor these processes are flawed. The
most efficient facility in our study was 17% efficient (six hours to
do an hour’s worth of work). 88% of facilities do not track lost
time.
- Neither of these above problems is being
addressed because management is not aware of them.
- It costs an average of 43% more money to
run a facility that has these problems than one without them.
- The core obstacle to improvement in the long-term
care industry is Management’s Defensive System. Management in the
organizations in this study did not view the verifiable data as valid,
did not accept it, and did not act on it. This becomes the core obstacle
to improving quality and financial health. If management chooses not
to act, then obviously these problems cannot be fixed.
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Nonprofits:
How Effective are Nonprofits
Are you part of a nonprofit organization? We would
very much like you to participate in our newest research project!
- Since Zenith was formed, we have been researching
the effectiveness of organizations around the world. We have analyzed
a number of nonprofits as part of this research, but in order to draw
more valid conclusions, we need to gather more data.
- Specifically, this research assesses how
a nonprofit measures against eight characteristics of effectiveness.
- Please let us include your nonprofit in this
research. What we would do is discreetly observe one meeting of your
board of directors. We would undertake this under strict confidentiality.
- In return for your participation, we would offer
a feedback session to your board, executive committee, or key officers,
which will highlight what we discovered. We would provide this feedback
session at our expense. This feedback could take as little as 30 minutes.
- Our research has four purposes:
- To deepen our knowledge of how organizations
handle critical information. We believe we are world experts on this
topic, and we must remain so.
- To deepen our knowledge of how nonprofits handle
critical information, and how they do so differently than for-profit
organizations.
- To help individual nonprofits and the nonprofit
community as a whole better understand their critical issues.
- To broaden Zenith’s reputation by exposing
nonprofit board members to our unusually significant abilities.
- Our purpose is not to attract nonprofits as clients;
unfortunately, working directly with nonprofits does not fit our business
strategy and goals.
- We would very much like your participation. Please
let us know what questions we can answer for you as you consider this.
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