Creating Excellence out of Crisis: Organizational Transformation at the Chicago Tribune

This article describes an organizational transformation effort involving one of the Chicago Tribune's printing facilities. In July 1985, a walkout strike affecting 1,000 workers occurred, which prompted management to seek to change the printing center to meet its vision of technological and managerial excellence. Consultants conducted a transformation effort that was conceptually similar to an organization development program, but differed in its focus on results and measures of attaining them. This effort produced statements of operating beliefs and key result areas (including implementing the operating beliefs, human resources development, and effective use of capital and resources) for performance measurement. The results include a 25% improvement in productivity in pages per hour and tens of millions of dollars in potential savings in annualized advertising revenues. The authors conclude that visions of organizations of the future must be grounded in clear, integrated action steps permitting measurable outcomes.