Vision

Once your Business's Vision & Mission are aligned with the global strategic direction, the next step is to break it down to the operational level where real action happens. 

Your Board of Directors or steering management can come up with a strategy for your future, but it's only your daily Operations that can make it become a reality.   

It is here, exactly at this point where your Operations Performance come into play.

The conventional wisdom says to maximize profits through low wages, optimized scheduling, and extensive inventory management system. This was probably working to some extent until the world shifted from a slow moving space to a complex and fast changing environment. In these conditions swift adaptability to new conditions start being vital for a company to thrive.*

For that very reason, even the definition and the process of Optimizing the overall business outcome are to be refined or completely redefined  accordingly.  

Because of my professional horizontal growth, I've got a clear understanding that Optimizing Each department, each function, each part of the company doesn’t even closely optimize the Whole outcome of the business. 

Most organizations today fall into the same trap. They look at isolated metrics, but fail to see the whole system. They optimize each part of the business separately, and fail to consider how they interact. When we see an operation as a set of isolated metrics to optimize, we can lose our sense of context and decrease overall performance. And ultimately fall into an efficiency paradox.      

General Stanley McChrystal, United States Army general, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), in his book Team of Teams,  describes this aspect of the over-optimization problem. Although his soldiers were winning every battle in Iraq post 9/11, somehow they were losing the war. 

General McChrystal realized that although his squads of highly trained commandos and intelligence analysts were performing separately their tasks with world class efficiency, they were failing as a Mission division to “see the whole system.” 

McChrystal took the unusual step of decreasing the emphasis on efficiency and focused his sights on "agility and interoperability". 

By boosting the roles of liaison officers and embedding specialists in each other’s units, he slowed each unit down slightly, but overall operational efficiency increased by a factor of seventeen (17 X).(1)

Managers often fall into the trap of thinking that by improving each part of their enterprise and clear cutting workforce and responsibilities by expertise, they will improve the overall value of the business. Yet the experience has shown that the opposite is often true. The reason being that Bridges are always better than Walls if we'd like to achieve more effective flow of communication and efficiency

(1) From Harvard Business Review and Forbes Magazine.  

One problem with the legacy structure is that the world is not that Linear to fit in such Linear structure. More so, it is far too complex to be reduced to excel sheets, organization charts, and diagrams. Let's face it, at the end of the day nobody pays any attention whatsoever to how green the internal metrics are if the overall outcome is not satisfying,"For a tree is only known by its fruit"  and so go for the business.

What’s really important is not the nodes, but the network. That’s what General McChrystal means when he speaks of “seeing the system.”

If everyone is trained — and compensated — to focus on only their part of the task, the shared mission is lost. 

That’s not a path to greater efficiency or profitability.

For that very reason, and in order to survive and keep performing even in a fast changing world (a world where you'd have to understand, integrate, leverage and effectively interact with Data Science, Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, Internet Of Things, Internet of Value, Blockchain, Distributed ledgers, Oracles ...) Smart Organizations would definitely have to reinvent and embrace new ways of achieving Performance, Interoperability, Technology and Optimization. 

Such Organizations would have a real competitive advantage to lead the pack of Tomorrow. And Tomorrow starts today.