by Donnie MacNicol
The Boston Consulting Group published an excellent article titled "There’s No Such Thing as Corporate DNA. Why You Have to Be Prepared to Change Everything to Endure". The 3 key messages were neatly summarised as:
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Three strategies distinguish long-lasting companies: innovation, restructuring and growth.
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These strategies work as a virtuous circle. A new idea requires you to restructure. This process creates the growth you need to invest in innovation.
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The heart - and soul - of your company is defined by your relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, investors and communities.
Given the well publicised statistics regarding the success of major change initiatives, how optimistic should we be for the future? I would suggest very optimistic and excited about the changes coming for the following reasons:
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The success stats are misleading - I would suggest that there are a lot of projects and programmes that are delivered successfully, or successfully enough to satisfy most people’s expectations, but we never hear about them.
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We have done it in the past and will continue to in the future - there are organisations who have made at least dramatic changes and can no doubt deliver drastic changes IF they have the SMT (Senior Management Team) leadership in place and resources to achieve it
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Strategy Execution is a growing area of interest, expertise and research with a new breed of highly capable Transformation Directors tasked with making dramatic, and no doubt in the future drastic change - helping to translate organisational objectives into the world of programmes and projects
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Programmification (of which we are seeing more and more with our clients) has seen a growing number of organisations defining change in terms of programmes with all that come with that - the primary focus on benefits, and the tools to deal with uncertainty and volatility (more to come on that shortly in future posts)
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In turn organisations are developing their programme leaders who are capable of delivering in a VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world - we are gaining huge insights from supporting 4 clients in this.
So in summary I am optimistic and excited and can only wonder how exciting the world will be for future generation of change professionals.