How to build an adaptive organization
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 391.
Evolve Or Be Left Behind
Ex.1. Translate the following text into Russian on the spot.
Ex.2. Translate in writing the paragraphs describing the four principal patterns of global culture: Spearhead, Outpost, Disoriented and Global.
Joshua-Michele Ross
Ray Ozzie, the departing chief software architect at Microsoft, posted an open memo this week. In it Ozzie reflects on the past five years of disruption that has remade much of the world we live in, and some of the challenges he sees coming:
... In the past five years so much has happened that we've grown already to take many of these changes for granted.
We've seen bulky monitors replaced by impossibly thin touch screens. We've seen business processes and entire organizations transformed by the zero-friction nature of the Internet; the walls between producer and consumer having now vanished. Substantial business ecosystems have collapsed as many classic aggregation & distribution mechanisms no longer make sense. Organizations worldwide, in every industry, are now stepping back and re-thinking the basics; questioning their most fundamental structural tenets. Doing so is necessary for their long-term growth and survival.
As end-consumers of these technologies, it is easy to remain inconsiderate of how transformational they are. However in business, emerging technologies and the customer expectations that they have created represent tectonic shifts in how business must respond and reorganize.
And as the speed of connectivity and proliferation of access points (mobile, tablets, connected devices, etc.) increase so will the rate of change for business. In this environment the only ones who will thrive are those capable of rapid, continuous adaptation at an organizational level. This is not a strategy, but a cultural trait.
The adaptive organization is one with a workforce capable of (1) surfacing leadership from all levels as inputs to decision-making; (2) amplifying weak signals from the points at which the organization meets the outside world (sales, customer service and even further beyond into customer led innovation, etc.); (3) matching the pace of information flow inside the organization with what is occurring outside; and (4) developing rapid feedback mechanisms with which to assess the impact of (5) making a distributed series of bets. In this way, optimization of small strategies will often win over the "big bet."
Technology is the superstructure upon which all business is now reliant. Every business process and every function is mediated through electronic technology: from communications (telephone, e-mail, electronic documents) to finance, resource planning and supply chain.
Business must co-evolve at the rate of technological change in order to remain competitive. This is not to say successful organizations must maintain cutting-edge technology, but that they must foster cultures that are capable of shifting and changing with the requirements of the business environments they find themselves in. As technology comes to resemble organic processes and evolve at a quickening rate, so must our own organizations.