During the past 10 years, with the general adoption of the Internet, people are connected in a way like never before in human history. Individual voices can now be heard farther, wider and deeper, and making perceptible impact in business, politics and social norms. As a result prevailing order are being disrupted.
In this new order, small companies with interesting ideas, services or business models can get easy and inexpensive global market reach. With consumer desire now readily harvestable from the sea of public data, opportunities arise for those who have the smarts to listen and the capability to act quickly. The competitive landscape for business is no longer price, geography and brand; for businesses that touch consumers they now compete on value, service, business model, and consumer alignment.
The assets that once allowed a business to win in the old world: manufacturing facilities, raw materials, land and a hierarchical management structure are now dead weights that prevent companies from moving forward. The new asset is people; smart people with ideas, passion and leadership skills.
If companies were analogous to people, then agile and fit ones would definitely be more apt to survive in a chaotic environment than those that are obese and slow.
A lot of HR consultants touch on the subject by talking about how to use human capital to your strategic advantage. They mostly tell you to treat your employees well and in return employees will give you the best. But these ideas missed the fact that organizations are constantly evolving and need for hard and soft skills change. When competing in the new order, retaining too many people with mismatched hard and soft skills dampens a business’ responsiveness and agility. Many companies tend to let such deterioration drag on until one day it overwhelms the entire organisation.
Just like a person, when the person’s job involves a lot of repetitive heavy lifting， then his size, stability and predictability matter. But when the job requires lots of fast, intense and creative actions, you need a lean, strong body and a sharp mind. To compete in this new world one has to get back in shape; and lose weight would be the first step. Once the body is lean, the muscles as well as the mind can be sharpened much more easily.
To embark on this journey, the first step is to find your direction and goals. Identify the market you want to compete in and how to compete, this way you can determine what kind of challenges lay ahead of you. With this insight you can estimate what kind of talents you need in order to win the future battles, and evaluate what functions are, and will, be important. For the functions that are important, you can further analyze how healthy it is from the perspectives of leadership, process, skills, and readiness and determine how to make improvements. For functions that have deem to be ineffective, redundant or irrelevant they can be considered for restructuring, reduction or even outsourcing.
Some may argue that this kind of organization tinkering is something managers in most companies are doing anyway. What is suggested here is for external organization to initiate and lead such structural review effort as opposed to putting incumbent managers in charge. When competitive edge comes from creativity, speed and agility; overly emphasis on process knowledge and employee harmony is no longer enough. New thinking and quick assemble and reassemble of processes are needed for a company to connect to the changing world and stay relevant. So for the benefit of the organization a more neutral and balanced opinion rooted from a bigger picture would serve the best interest for the company. It is just like a person needs a personal trainer to be shown what the real body shape should be like, where and how workout is needed, and ensures that the exercises are done.
There is no doubt that going through such organization workout regiment pain from a cost, process and emotional perspective is inevitable. However, if you ask healthy and fit people or even doctors, they can tell you the alternative will be much more costly, painful and last much longer.
