In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, an organization’s blemishes get readily exposed. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. To deliver the absolute best products and services, it’s imperative that organizations perform flawlessly. Too often what holds organizations back is “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom” (James O’Toole) when it comes to the inevitable changes that are required of today’s organizations. It’s the equivalent of the organization having sand in its gears. The only way organizations can achieve big things - important things - is to bring together disparate groups to innovate and forge unique approaches to operating the business. For many, this can prove unsettling - given the amount of change involved.
For these initiatives to succeed it is imperative that people exhibit trustworthiness, act collaboratively, and remain resolute - just as a professional would.
Here’s a few examples:
| Business Goal | Business Initiative | The Initiative Became Necessary Because... |
|
To enable Marketing to develop more targeted, more sophisticated products and services for the organization’s most loyal customers. |
Enhancing the collaboration between Marketing and IT. |
The relationship between the two departments is often dysfunctional. |
|
To upgrade antiquated business processes to current ‘best-practice’ standards—resulting in enhanced performance in the marketplace. |
Accelerating the implementation of critical, new cross-functional business processes. |
Current business processes have proven ineffective and continue to expose the organization to unacceptable levels of risk, poor levels of customer satisfaction, and weak levels of financial performance. |
| To be thought of the market-leader in new product innovation in the consumer- goods space. |
To identify and procure as much externally-developed new product innovation as business plans call for. |
The development of home- grown innovation wasn’t keeping up with the needs of the market and, ultimately, the needs of the greater organization. |
|
To reduce the degree of undesirable behavior from Field personnel and elevate the level of ownership and performance from the Field. |
Elevate the importance of the role that front-line field leadership plays in Operations. |
Poor safety record, under-performance against standards, spotty productivity, and lackadaisical leadership from front-line field leadership. |
|
Bringing forth the very best market-driven products that have been influenced by the needs of real-world, credit-card toting, end-users. |
Enhancing the collaboration between Sales and Marketing. |
Sales and Marketing often compete, rather than collaborate, when discharging their respective responsibilities. It’s the customer that ultimately gets short-changed when this occurs. |
Of course, each of these initiatives involves change. Sometimes the change is merely an annoyance, other times quite dramatic. In either instance, the change is rarely welcomed. For each of these initiatives to be successful it’s important for people to get beyond themselves, ‘up their game’, and realize what’s required of them as a professional. A review of the seven mind-sets gives a great context as to why they’re so helpful in driving initiatives like these to successful completion.
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