Organisational Transformation Success Stories

Organisational transformation involves examining the future and the now of your entire business.  The advice I’d like to pass on is agree up front who your primary stakeholders will be, will you use and advisory team, agree what you will NOT do, agree a list of quality questions you wish to ask of yourselves, articulate in a story telling manner what your future looks and feels like.   Do not jump to ‘how’ you will transform.   By agreeing and signing off what you will not do and what quality questions you wish to ask will save significant time – I guarantee it ! It will also inspire those involved in designing the opportunities.

Here are a few of the don’ts I would put on a list and then below a few transformation stories.  If you wish to uncover some quality questions to ask of yourself – message me.   And these same guidelines work in your personal life as well as business !

Ferne’s list of DO NOT’s …  

1. …start in the now; start with the future in mind and work backwards
2. …build from bottom up; if you start with pixels you will end up with pixels
3. …commence on a journey without a story to tell; you may not know the destination but the value proposition and the experience and feeling people will realise, customer and employee, is critical to articulate
4. ...build an organisational design that cannot flex a % of its workforce and operating model to strategic priorities
5. …start an organisational design change without agreeing a method; you do not need to reinvent the wheel, you will not be as unique as you think you are.
6. …let change management be your achilleas heal !  Design the strategy, assess against your current values and culture, understand what are the big ticket items that need to change, execute change activities and as you develop your delivery roadmap map your projects or programs to one or more big ticket change themes.  Do not drive change at individual project or initiative level, drive it at the program or portfolio level and let the change needs dictate your priorities and scope.
7. …don’t let others influence your culture to say agile and change are like water and oil!

Organisational changes can occur on a range of different scales from hiring new or training existing people to acquiring a bulk new customer set, to modifying processes, to shifting the way teams operate alongside one another, to large scale initiatives that involve changing the entire direction of the company.  But what to do first, second, in parallel, what is critical vs important.  That is the art of transformation vs the skill of it.  Alignment of your executive team is critical.

Although organisational transformation is driven by management, the employees are heavily involved in the design, it is critical to keep them engaged and informed and embrace the vision of the transformation and commit to the journey.  Organisational change is essential for business longevity. It enables your company to remain competitive, evolve with the times and survive.

Look up the % of businesses who DO NOT survive post year 10.  Look at the primary reasons why.

Below are some examples of companies who successfully implemented an organisational transformation, and will continue to evolve and test themselves.

Google

In 2015 the co-founder of Google, Larry Page made the decision to transform the entirety of the Google enterprise by launching a new company called Alphabet.

At the time Google was operating well, but Page believed that “in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.” In fact, Google had become so large and diverse that it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In order to avoid future difficulties, Page made the decision to break down the entire company and branch each area into its own company under the parent company Alphabet (Google being the largest of those companies).

Page is now the CEO of Alphabet with Google co-founder Sergey Brin as president. Each company under Alphabet has its own CEO and goals unique to its vision. Other than Google, some of the companies under Alphabets umbrella focus on areas such as high speed technology solutions, healthcare and disease prevention research, investment options for start-ups, self-driving cars, global internet access, drone delivery services, self-driving cars, solar and turbine energy to name a few.

In page’s announcement of the new company launch he states “Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence.”

Microsoft

While Google deconstructed and branched out, Microsoft banded together. With the rising success of Google and Apple, Microsoft was struggling to stay relevant. Additionally, Microsoft was experiencing a toxic culture. Partnering teams were operating as rivals, and there was an overall low morale throughout the corporation. Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014 and immediately began the transformation of Microsoft. In his own words he stated that “Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind… When I was named Microsoft’s third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority.”

He began by setting a handful of shared goals throughout all divisions of Microsoft to bring the company back to together to focus on a shared vision. 2 years later he combined all artificial intelligence sectors together to create a team of roughly 5000 engineers and computer scientists. This team had a shared mission to focus on innovation across Microsoft product lines.

Under Nadella’s guidance Microsoft acquired technology such as GitHub, LinkedIn and Azure and transformed the company from product to service base. Microsoft’s market value has increased from US300 million to US1 trillion. Nadella’s initiatives provide employees with a shared vision that created productive collaboration used to develop innovative technology to reconstruct Microsoft.

As depicted in the above examples, the needs of each business are diverse and thus each organisational transformation program are very unique. The first step for you is to establish where you wish to be in the future via what unique value proposition, where are you today in relation to that vision including values, experiences and feelings for customers and employees.  Agree your stakeholders and if necessary and advisory team, agree the dont’s.   Then ask yourself a range of quality questions that will inspire and innovate as to what changes do I need to make to get there?

Love Life  Love YOUR Life

Ferne Eliz King