Business Improvement and Social media

Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long bedeviled organizations. In a digital world, solving these cultural problems is no longer optional.

Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age. That is a central finding from McKinsey’s recent survey of global executives (Exhibit 1), which highlighted three digital-culture deficiencies: functional and departmental silos, a fear of taking risks, and difficulty forming and acting on a single view of the customer.

Via David Hain

When small companies grow rapidly, the culture can get lost in a sea of new people, processes, geographic expansion, aggressive growth targets, and the avalanche of changes needed to scale. The culture can become a boat anchor, dragging behind the desired direction and pulling people in the wrong direction. But when senior leaders make a conscious decision to keep the best of the cultural elements that brought the company success in the first place, great things can happen.

Cafe Rio Mexican Grill did just that. In 2011, Dave Gagnon, a former Burger King senior vice president of North America company operations and training, took over as CEO and COO. Andy Hooper, who had led the culture-shaping work at Burger King, joined Cafe Rio as chief people officer. The organization had an outstanding culture, and was in its third year of nearly double-digit comparable sales growth. But to grow rapidly, the executive leadership team needed to codify the culture that was largely built on ‘tribal knowledge transfer’ to scale for national expansion.

Via David Hain

Over the past several decades, the business world has relentlessly pursued efficiency-driven business process reengineering, seeking to integrate, standardize, and automate tasks in ways that can reduce costs, increase speed, and deliver more predictable outcomes. As the landscape shifts, perhaps it’s time for organizations to expand their focus beyond business process reengineering to pursue business practice redesign, helping frontline workgroups to learn faster and accelerate performance improvement, especially in environments that are shaped by increasing uncertainty and unexpected events. The perspective we outline here goes beyond the growing work done on high-performing teams and agile practices by focusing specifically on the practices necessary to accelerate performance improvement over time.

Via David Hain