Organisational change

I'm on a mission to help marketing catch up with the realities of today, and one of the areas I believe still requires some attention is the way businesses focus on their customers. Or in modern day jargon, how far they are "customer centric". Sure, by now we know that focusing on the customer can help you grow sales, build loyalty and even get customers to recommend you to others. There are even a growing number of people that deploy the Net Promoter Score or similar metrics as a tool to achieve just that.

Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization. Leaders routinely challenge employees to tear down silos, transcend boundaries, and work together in cross-unit teams. And although such initiatives often meet with resistance because they place an extra burden on individuals, the potential benefits of collaboration are significant: innovative cross-unit product development, increased sales through cross-selling, the transfer of best practices that reduce costs.

Collaboration is one of those words that everybody loves and uses. At many companies, at least until the recession hit, collaboration was a mark of progressivity.

If the human race wants to survive on this planet, it will have to change its behaviour, its institutions, its government structures and its way of doing business. The chaordic theory carries the promise of the better organisational approach that will support this. Can it really work that way?

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of "Generation F" - the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they'll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

One theme persistently comes up whenever I talk social media, either inside my workplace or outside. This is "culture change." When talking about catalyzing adoption of social media within the enterprise, at some point, someone will predictably say something like, "the most important thing is to get the culture to change."

The bulk of my work concerns people's interactions with technology, and my field is currently in a remarkable period of development. Just five years ago, most people used computers and mobile phones through very limited means of input -- the tools essentially reduced the people using them to fingers: typing, pressing buttons, mousing, or maneuvering a joystick.

In our last post, we discussed talent development as an operational challenge. This time around we'll explore how the organization itself needs to change so that it develops a talent edge.

It might seem a peculiar time to talk about talent. Aren't most people these days happy just to have their jobs? Aren't employers more concerned about outplacement than recruiting? And what company has the budget to fund expensive training programs?

As work is increasingly carried out by teams whose members are spread across the globe, learning leaders are challenged to design and deliver learning solutions that meet the needs of virtual teams, but also develop leaders who are comfortable and capable in the virtual environment.

If you follow the logic laid out by historians such as the late Alfred Chandler, who wrote classics like Scale and Scope and Strategy and Structure, companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale. The experience curve nicely represents this relationship: The bigger a company gets, the more experience it accumulates, and the more its performance--particularly cost performance--improves.

The past belonged to push, but the future belongs to pull.\nThat's an argument we've made before and in our most recent post, "Why Do Companies Exist?" --as well as more expansively in this Journal of Service Science article. What will pull-based institutions look like? How will they be organized? What dispositions, or mindsets, will they require? And what management practices will help them succeed?

In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?

Every organisation is continuously confronted with the dilemma of conflicting interests. Some initiative might help us progress in a given direction, yet it complicates things for other plans that we have. As in life, it is a matter of finding a balance. However, sometimes, we have to accept that certain things simply cannot go together.

The next big trend is simple: to simplify.\nThis is not news to anyone who's been around the track a few times. An emphasis on focus, speed, streamlining processes, and finding common platforms has characterized the best companies for years. The Internet has helped cut out intermediaries and enabled direct connections, instant feedback, and more information transparency. In design, sleek looks have replaced ornamentation.

Let's face it, major organizational change is tough enough when times are good, but when they are bad and going south like now, it is doubly hard. People go into survival mode. Managers tend to become more hierarchical. The result is the change process can slow down or stall. Given the dire need for change that many companies now have, this clearly is a huge problem.

Cooperation, despite being now considered the third force of evolution, just behind mutation and natural selection, is difficult to explain in the context of an evolutionary process based on competition between individuals and selfish behaviour. But this puzzle, that has haunted scientists for decades, is now a little closer to be solved by research about to be published on the journal Physical Review Letters.

An overlay of end-to-end process management onto existing functional organizations has its rough edges, to say the least. In fact, the transformation to a process-managed enterprise could really mean the End of Management, as we know it.

As high-tech supply chains increase in complexity, they become harder to manage. Collaboration between OEMs, suppliers, and retailers is the answer.

The goal of the Virtual Company Project is to build online tools to help groups create and implement governance rules necessary for successful collaboration. The project is premised on the belief that the right graphical interfaces can translate the structures of the group into clear and intelligible procedures that will enable teams to make decisions, control assets and enter into contractual relationships with third parties. The Virtual Company project is creating the interfaces and designing the back-end functionality that is needed to enable group participants to see themselves in relation to the group as a whole, allocate roles, establish accountability to the group, make collective decisions, and administer group assets, expenditures and distributions.