The Organic Organisation

World annual FDI inflows rose from an average of $50 billion per year in the period 1981-85 to $1.1 trillion in 2009. A 21 fold increase!

Women in Rwanda have since 2005 been able to display and sell their hand-woven basket creations in Macy’s, at the other end of the world. These baskets sell like hot cake and disappear from the shelves as fast as they appear.

The consultants have a field day on these facts. They announce a new world order. Managers get swayed by the rhetoric. The world is flat; The world is my oyster, it is also my market, as well as my supply chain. Globalization is the predominant force and I better get my strategy’s sails aligned with its strong winds.

Every weekday beginning at 6 a.m., sellers and buyers from around the world converge on the Aalsmeer auction complex near Amsterdam to trade more than 20 million flowers and plants, one-third of which are roses. More than 1,500 foreign growers from countries as far away as Kenya and Israel now send their products to Holland to be auctioned.

G20 governments have introduced more trade barriers, including export restrictions, in the past six months than in previous periods since the financial crisis began, according to the monitoring report by the World Trade Organization on 24 May 2011.

People get 95% of their news from domestic sources.

90% of the world’s people will never leave the country where they are born.

Trade barriers rose thick and fast as soon as the economic going got tough during the recession. Summits designed to curb such practices, with exotic names such as ‘The Doha Rounds’, miserably failed to reach consensus or conclusions.

The currently ongoing G8 summit is like a kitty party; a lot gets discussed, pleasantries get exchanged between expensive suits, biscuits get consumed with disdain, nothing gets achieved.

The consultants announce a new paradigm; The world is as round as round can get. Local is the new global. Better to be a monopoly at home than a grain of sand on the world beach.  I better anchor in my domestic market, in my protected comfort zone. The managers hunker down.

These dynamic paradoxes of our business environment are like Natrajan’s cosmic dance.  In perpetual motion, a constant struggle between crests and troughs, in a state of continuous flux, like the bubbly waters of the Ganges.

Globalization versus protectionism, local versus global, an independent set of nation states versus an integrated global society.

Strategic responses soar to similar paradoxical heights.

Enterprises first vertically integrate to own and control the entire value chain or achieve the zenith of scale and size. They acquire, they merge, they partner. They become behemoths worthy of respect and fear.

Then soon after they shed off SBU’s in a hurry to focus on the core. They de-merge, sell off and divorce away their partners. It was only recently that I read how brilliantly Cisco had acquired Linksys and kept it at arm’s length using the ‘adapt’ rather than ‘aggregate’ strategy for M&A integration. However the tweet world is now alive with the fact that Cisco might sell off Webex and Linksys to focus on its core!

So what does one do in this era of paradoxes? Which strategies to deploy? Which jargon will remain so and which ones will evolve into the next big thing?

I am personally fascinated with the Honeycomb archetype to give organizations a stab at managing life’s increasing paradoxes. To architect the enterprise as a collection of small autonomous cells held together both by a common language and a crystal clear purpose. To power the strategic intent to ‘dream big, deliver small, move fast’.

Maybe it’s time to shed the legacy of legacy organization structures, cut through their fabric and carve out nimble, organizational cells instead. To breakdown big business processes into smaller services, big teams into micro-teams of sizes 3-5.

Maybe it is time to re-invent the way we see an enterprise - from a collection of big departments (HR, Finance, blah blah) to smaller cells each performing a distinctive service, in service of the customer. Self performing, self-motivated high performing cells requiring little supervision or management. As a whole these cells forming an organizational Honeycomb.  A structure designed from ground up to be able to sense and respond to the world’s curve balls. Agile and nimble by birth.

Inspired by nature.

An organic organization.

The four letter conundrum

IT folks have a fetish for equating quality to four letter words.

And size as well as height does matter when it comes to acronyms in the IT world. The higher the level and the more enigmatic sounding the word (I am ISO…….ISO27001!), the higher it moves in our hierarchy of respect. We love these acronyms- CMMI, ITIL, VALIT, COBIT, et al. We include them on our CVs. We proudly use them on our signatures. It’s a secret society created by IT, of IT, for IT.

No one outside, especially our customers in the business understand what the bleep are we talking about!

Before you form an opinion that I do not love these acronyms, hold your horses just yet. I have been in the IT world for 21 plus years now, so YES I too have a fetish for these profound four letters.

Quite often I get off from the wrong side of my right bed, full of pride and honor and announce to my wife how I have attained nirvana in the world of IT four letters. How I have climbed the Himalayan peaks of their levels and achieved lofty heights. How, given my conquest of these insurmountable heights, everyone in the family should bow in front of me and treat me like the God of Geekland, I am .

The response is usually in other four letters which incidentally are also quite famous in the IT world, however best kept verbal in context.

So the point is, whether I can impress my erudite family or not, I too have a passion for these acronyms. They represent an important aspect of quality. Process and frameworks are essential to guide a large workforce towards consistency in the quality of their outcomes.

However there is more to a passion for quality than just frameworks. The secret potion I believe lies in the intent of the workforce, in the shared sensibilities of the people. Therein lies the leadership challenge. How to engage the hearts, minds and the passion of a large workforce to significantly up the ante on quality? How to achieve a state wherein high quality is a way of life and not just a certificate embellishing corporate mahogany walls?

A number of strategies are deployed to try and get close to this state. However my favorite mantra to tackle this challenge, is encapsulated in this beautiful phrase ‘Show me the Taj’

The engineers on project teams and at the back office need to be up, close and personal to the goals their efforts are enabling for the business. They need to feel the pulse of the business and appreciate what underpins success. Sometimes an overdose of vision, mission, core values, value proposition, strategies, goals, objectives and other such terms can confuse the grass roots on exactly where the company is going and what it expects from them. A simple statement of ‘purpose’ which covers the essence can get the message across and its simplicity makes it sticky.

Nothing however beats conversations directly with the business managers to get close to the big picture and the final outcomes expected from IT projects. However the way IT goes about its business today, it ends up creating a two class society – the front office account managers and analysts who get to see and hear the business and the back office engineers who are allocated technical tasks, largely oblivious to or disconnected with the business outcomes.  This way of working seemingly optimizes the use of resources however misses the opportunity to engage the engineers at a deeper level.

There is a big difference in the subconscious engagement if an engineer believes he/she is building a search routine as opposed to knowing that he/she is organizing the world’s information. A big difference in their internal commitment to quality if they believe they are laying a brick as opposed to building the Taj.

Leaders need to build a framework to effectively show the Taj to all team members and in doing so ignite their creative spark and their passion for quality.