by sravan ankaraju on June 27, 2010
in Execution
Over the last 2 months, I have been having conversations about playbooks, and best practices for many subject areas that are important for day-to-day running of the business. This was the result of running a small crowd sourcing project to generate outside the box thinking for the whitespace opportunities. In my view, the ideas that float to the top based on voting, ranking, and quality of comments is great for problem solving exercise but not the best to gather best practices for running of business. The reason is customer best practices have context and relevancy based on the size of the customer, industry, culture of an organization, and multiple other factors including the person managing the relationship. These cannot be codified. The unpredictability requires informal mechanisms, most of which can be clearly identified and consciously influenced, and that link very closely with other cultural elements.
A good definition of culture per Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary is – “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, practices that characterizes (human behaviors in) a company or corporation”. This definition puts human behaviors at the center of culture, and human behaviors always involve both rational and emotional dimensions, as well as formal and information components.
According to authors, Jon R. Katzenback & Zia Khan of the book, Leading outside the lines, “the formal is best used for predictable and repeatable work that needs to be done efficiently and with little variance. The predictability and repeatability of the work warrants the effort to develop the infrastructure of the formal organization, which can be documented and constantly improved upon to improve efficiency and remove variation. Conversely, the informal is best applied for issues that arise outside the scope of the formal organization, the surprises that need to be sensed and solved. Increasingly, people who need to do the solving need to be motivated outside the reward system, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and make decisions with little guidance from formal strategies”.
This is my area of passion which is balancing the formal via Management by Objectives (MBO) to drive business forward, with influencing the cultural elements through people engagement and participation. Again, per Jon & Zia – “the ‘best practice’ is a means of improving performance in various functions, departments, and levels of management. To go beyond best practice requires a level of insight, risk taking, and trial-and-error responsiveness that demands understanding and harnessing of the informal. This separates ‘best performance’ from ‘best practice’”.
This is the time of the year, every year, that I spend understanding the formal and informal. I would like to hear from the readers of this blog how you have able to drive change and better results – formal and/or informal.
by sravan ankaraju on June 13, 2010
in Execution
One of the things that I have been thinking about is whether I am adding any value to the blog for others. Yes, most of my content is around Operating Models, occasional leadership stuff, and links to quality videos on TED.com. My goal has always been about Getting off the Drawing board and start doing something even if it is not fully planned. There is a cliché that “Failure to Plan is a Plan for Failure” but the length of a plan, and thorough analysis of every data point also does not lead to success. The more I link to others content on Operating & Business Models; I have begun to understand that the context in which decisions are being made is as important. The end result i.e. Operating Model the company has chosen, or the business model that the organization has decided to run with, is based on many hours if not thousands of hours of effort. So what was on the drawing board? Did parameters, factors and variables include Cost, Profits, Capabilities of the organization, risks of execution, and politics?
Is the easy access to data on the internet making our brains shallow? Do we have any new insights to assist the organizations to move them to next level of performance? This is the struggle. We make investments make on Green Field. We look at White Space Opportunities, Long Tails, and Blue Oceans. It is fascinating to see so many colors – Blue, White and Green, but what about GREY? Is there a perfect color that is so obvious, that we all knew would lead us to success?
I am ranting here. Leadership, developing a culture of curiosity, asking tough questions, quick gut & pulse check, making mistakes and quickly learning from them are as important as factual data based analysis. What is individual’s mental capacity (EQ) in making that final GO-NO GO decision? How do you balance and Formal business drivers with informal cultural aspects that motivates the teams to push the business into new frontiers? I am curious to understand how you are getting stuff off our drawing boards. I have read lots of books that share authors’ perspectives and in most cases the books are darn good read. But does it help you get off the inertia and actually do something….
I consider John Wooden and Warren Buffett as two great teachers. Their main attribute is that they are great teachers of fundamentals whether it is finance or coaching. John Wooden is no more. He passed away on June 4th, 2010 at the age of 99, but his wisdom lives on.
Leadership
- Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are
- Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming
- Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful
- Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there
- The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team
- It is what we learn after we know it all that really counts
- Things turn out best for people who make the best out of the way things turn out
Execution
- If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes
- Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do
- It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen
- If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
- Never mistake activity for achievement
- It isn’t what you do, but how you do it
As my continuing effort to learn and share about Organizational and Operating Models, this week I pulled information about the Dell Operating Model. The content posted here is from the Dell Operating Model thesis that was submitted to the Sloan School of Management by Blaine Paxton in 2004. In 2008, Dell drove actions to enhance Competitiveness, and Optimize Operations to improve profitability and cash flow. Like every company that went through growth and revenue adjustments, and organizational realignments because of 2008 financial crisis, the changed conditions may have influenced the current Dell’s operating model as well. However, if we assume that the Operating Model is the foundation for execution of Strategies, the fundamentals of the Core Operating Model should sustain up and down of the market place. To that end, I believe the premise of the thesis around People, and Practices at Dell should still be relevant now in understanding the subject of Operating Models.
Dell’s operating model consists of four assumptions about how people should work:
- Being obsessed with producing results,
- Being flexible in the way work is done,
- Leveraging the value of personal relationships, and
- Encouraging leadership at all levels in the organizations
If Vertical integration is about owning and operating multiple steps in the value chain, then Virtual integration is about owning one step, but coordinating the actions of many steps. Dell and its supplier’s area uniquely configured network of alliances and partnerships i.e. Virtual Integration. One of the core competencies is strategic outsourcing.
Some general management practices at Dell:
- Expecting a high level of personal accountability
- Minimizing celebration / maintaining sense of urgency
- Management teamwork, especially “two-in-the-box” management
- Tightly managing the balance of revenue and growth
- Being able to kill losing projects quickly
One of the interesting methods I noted out of thesis is “Time pacing” which is creating new products or services, launching new businesses, or entering new markets according to the calendar. Time pacing according to Blaine Paxton’s thesis “can counteract the natural tendency for managers to wait too long, move too slowly, and lose momentum”. It also “create a relentless sense of urgency around meeting deadlines” while at the same time creating predictability by giving “people a sense of control in otherwise chaotic markets”.
Is your Operating Model still relevant? If not, what is driving those changes?
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