Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch (Source: Youtube)

Success in the marketplace through alignment of critical business levers

What makes an organizational successful? .... My immediate response to that question - "an organization with a sound strategy which it executes with excellence through its people with enabling policies, processes & technology framework in a supportive external environment may become successful over a given period of time"

So, if we look at the response mentioned above we may find that organizational success is an outcome of a combination of factors both internal and external to it which come together in harmony to create a successful venture.

Given the stage of existence at which an organization is, the impact of these factors on the success of an organization may vary, for instance, a small organization may be able to achieve success by relying more heavily on select bright and hardworking individuals but as this organization grows, it may become imperative to develop enabling processes and policies to support size and scale and reduce dependence on individuals. Similarly, if an organization visualizes innovation and intrapreneurship as its mainstay of growth, it has to have enabling policies and processes which encourage its people to innovate. One shining example of organizational processes encouraging innovation is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation or 3M as it is known to all of us. 3M processes allow every employee to actually spend 15% of their workweek pursuing individual projects of their own choices. The employees don’t even have to share the details of the project with their managers, let alone justify these projects. Furthermore, every business unit is encouraged to innovate, to the extent that as a policy matter it is mandated that 30% of its revenues most come from products introduced in the last four years.

Similar cases in point of successful interaction of people, process, technology and policy levers to achieve organizational success has been seen across organizations such as Wal-Mart and Dell. These organizations looked at the eventual outcome to be achieved and then aligned the people, process, technology and policy levers to churn out the desired output.

If you want to be a customer centric organization, make sure that your people know what it means for them in their day to day interactions with the end customer and at the same time everything from the organizations product display, distribution & exchange policies to promotion plans, incentive schemes and pay raises etc. mirror that.

Hence, while designing organizational strategies it is critical to understand the nature of impact these strategies may have on each of the business levers and how the organization intends to better align these changes to achieve its strategic goals. The impact on critical business levers and the organizations ability to manage that impact, can actually act as a crucial filter for the organization to decide whether a particular strategy can be successfully executed or not. By building this self correcting evaluation mechanism at the strategy design stage itself, the organization actually brings execution focus right from the outset and hence eliminates the most critical problem facing organizations today i.e. lack of execution excellence.

To summarize, it can safely be said that for an organization to achieve success and continuously beat the bourses it is critical to focus on end outcomes while constantly aligning its internal management systems to talk to each other and aim towards achieving the desired end outcomes.