Ingredients for success now and in the future

Building blocks of a dynamic organization

• New innovations – products, technologies, and services – threaten to replace any organization that fails to keep up.

• It is one thing to build a successful company, and quite another to build a company that is able to retain its success over the years...

• There are successful turnarounds…

• But is it really necessary to go through this cycle of success and failure? Could a company reinvent itself constantly and not fall victim to complacency?

Why should I build a dynamic organization?

• Service: What is it that the organization does for its customers? “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

• System: Processes, structures, and partnerships that are used to provide the service.

• Individuals: How the people in the organization are motivated, empowered, and coached in order to continuously improve their own skills, the system, and the service provided.

How an organization addresses these determines how dynamic it is.

The three building blocks of an organization

• It is the dawn of a new era, one where companies realize that they do not create value, but only help their customers create value.

Value is subjective and determined by the beneficiary

Our awe at our newfound ability to produce things at scale overwhelmed the nuisance that these things were not an exact match to any of the customers…

Companies now need to understand each of their customers more deeply again, just like a cobbler or tailor of old, only this time this deep understanding can be combined with having millions of customers

• Not fail fast, fail often!

• Plan, do, study, adjust – and do it faster than others!

Improving service: rapid experimentation

• Technology does not create dialogue, but it can be an essential tool in enabling it and in drawing insights from it

Improving service: establish dialogue

• Recognize the networks of actors and institutions that provide service to your customers, and be proactive in innovating reorganization of these networks – and you can carve a place for yourself.

Improving service: reorganize networks

• Look at what you do and try to find the link between that and what the customer needs.

• Then, try to figure out how to do things so that they are more in line with what the customer needs and thus provide the service faster, with better quality, and as a result, also cheaper.

Improving the system: connect what you do and what the customer needs

• To improve rapidly, distribute the responsibility for problem-solving throughout the organization.

• Support and coach each employee to become a better problem-solver – each manager needs to be able to give such support

Improving the system: everyone is a problem-solver

• Use social collaboration tools to build networks within the company, between a network of companies, and directly with customers.

• This enables more connections, more ideas, and serendipity.

Improving the system: everyone is connected

The individual: intrinsic motivation

• Control over your own life -> ability to make decisions at work

Autonomy

• Becoming better at what you do -> training, coaching, challenges

Mastery

• Connection with other people -> building one big family, culture

Relatedness

• Being part of something greater -> vision and purpose of the company

Purpose

• Prevent silos from forming by encouraging horizontal career moves, creating a culture of togetherness

• Most innovations happen when existing knowledge from different fields is combined in new ways

The individual: fostering generalists

• Improvement is a never-ending cycle – the moment you stop improving, you start to get worse

• Coach people on continuous improvement and give them sufficiently challenging tasks to help maintain a sense of urgency

The individual: coaching and challenging

Author

Ville Kilkku

LinkedIn profile: https://dk.linkedin.com/in/villekilkku

Blog: http://www.kilkku.com/blog/

Twitter: @VilleKilkku