Last week, I gave some hints on why today’s leaders of businesses must urgently adopt the “contextual CEO” strategy to safely and smartly ride the storm of the highly volatile and radically shifting marketplace. I stressed the advantages of imbibing the ambidextrous technique, that is, the ability to “write with both hands”. The distinguishing characteristic of the ambidextrous leader is the skill to shuttle between the exploit and explorer modes in his daily decision-making and execution activities.
I noted that a check on our organizations’ health has revealed a red flag on imminent death if we do not get rid of traditional linear business models and strategy frameworks. We cannot keep holding on to safe profitability and rigid boundaries in the present challenging business environment.
In this article, I am going to draw our attention to the danger of being trapped in incremental improvements on short term goals.
Apple, a gigantic enterprise that today conveniently delivers annual sales of over one hundred billion dollars, once declined and almost failed because of its traditional strategies and technologies. Even when the company took steps to make the strategies more efficient with carefully thought-through incremental innovations. The company even cherry-picked some new ideas.
Apple as a result of the decline in its market share, had to adopt a completely new architecture that accommodated and encouraged development of values derived directly from customers’ experience. It adopted as a matter of survival and growth, empirical and iterative direct customers’ involvement. Apple’s values became completely attuned to customers’ preferences. Direct sales and aligned-to-customers’ marketing strategies were also introduced.
One strategy that Apple excellently adopted was design thinking. This gave the CEO and his team the courage to conduct bold market-oriented business experiments.
Design thinking is a philosophy as well as a set of tools that enable smart organizations to solve problems creatively. It is the human-centered side of creative problem-solving that skillfully and fully engages value-adding commitment of leaders, teams and individual employees. Since the approach is human-centered, it involves a lot of empathizing. You must figure out who you are designing for, what their needs are, and then, solve their problems. You innovate based on your customers’ needs and not from the technology perspective. Design thinking steps are therefore, very flexible. Implementation of design thinking processes include; ability to empathize, define, provide solutions, create prototypes and then, test the prototypes with customers and potential customers.
As I said earlier, we must not get trapped in our usual inertia-producing success syndrome. We should say no to rigid metrics, targets, KPIs, structures and processes that are not smart. The business model in this shifting and challenging business environment should be procreative, big and bold experimentation. We can adopt three types of innovations with each reinforcing each other. They are; tailor-made and specific result-oriented efficiency, organisational design innovation and transformative innovation. Through transformative innovation, we can diligently explore market opportunities, adapt technologies and tailor-make business models as well as make them very robust. Also, we should adopt value propositions that allow us to lock in customers and improve on predictive incomes and inflows. Another critical innovation is organizational design innovation.
We must introduce collaborative problem-solving strategy in order to totally set aside unproductive selfish tendencies. We must pool together skill sets and encourage value-adding opinions. There is no ‘I’ in a team and there is no ‘I’ in a problem. The energy, quality and strength of the whole team determine success of organizations. Leaders and associates must be motivated to be fully committed to the need for daily involvement in adaptable actions to market needs. Attention to details, quality and commitment to daily innovative improvements, must be emphasized.
Today, there is a greater need to create an inclusive culture in the workplace. Leaders and associates must be impeccable in their words. They must speak with integrity and stop taking things personally. They must not make assumptions and must always contribute their best. Let us use the power of the word (spoken and written) to project truth and integrity. Micro or macro aggressions must not be allowed.
We must encourage and ensure an environment of dignity and respect in the workplace. Everybody must be treated fairly and have equal opportunity to access information and resources. The workplace must be a healthy place where everyone belongs through existing participation and contributions. There must be openness. We should all be sharing knowledge, ideas, useful experiences and discoveries.
Corporate culture, a critical competitive advantage must be creative and not a silent killer of exploration. There must be alignments of organization, people, skill sets and capabilities. We must create an environment in which core-and-beyond innovations initiatives are managed, so the ambidextrous expectations of entrepreneurial employees can flourish. According to Professor David Burkus, “the teams must make the dream work by amping up their abilities”.
Let me conclude with Judith Glaser’s corporate leadership trilogy, the Magic Triangle. According to Judith, the workplace must stand on three pillars: a positive and open environment for new wisdom. Leaders and associates must regularly speak up for the good of the organization. Also, we must always share challenges, uplift experiences and discuss discoveries. The third leg of the magic triangle, enjoins leaders and associates to craft breakthrough conversations for marketplace-inspired innovations. Hallmark of the workplace should be innovations forged through derivatives of customer expectations and insights.
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