Is your Organization in BUSINESS or BUSYNESS?

By Michael O' Adetu

The business environment is becoming more competitive especially in this era of the digital age. Organizations that must gain, retain, and sustain competitive advantage must be agile (highly responsive to change and proactive in terms of innovation). Unlike decades ago, the reality of the fourth industrial revolution not only demands that organizations that want to remain ahead of competition must be able to use technology as leverage and take advantage of the 21st-century knowledge circulation to achieve more as quickly as possible. We are already in a microwave world where consumers are becoming less patient thereby pushing the need for continuous innovation in technology, product development, services, and speeding up the pace at which work is being carried out in a typical organization. The sad part is organizations that fail to recognize this massive change already going on will be pushed out of the market or left behind due to the consumers decamping to service providers who understand the importance of meeting consumer needs as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, some organizations that might recognize this change are fast to respond but are quickly pushed from being in BUSINESS to BUSYNESS. The fast pace environment that enforces the need for change means that organizations need to remain awake in using the cutting edge of 21st-century technology to provide services or product that is much more better, faster and cheaper- BUSINESS in this context is solution-driven and highly customer-focused;  BUSYNESS, on the other hand, is simply activities driven. Organizations that are in business constantly take out time to understand the changes in their market and proactive enough by realigning resources to take advantage of the opportunities that come with such changes. In realigning their resources (either human, finance, technology, or knowledge), they ensure that all resources involved are carefully focused to achieve the desired outcome- which is to remain in business by providing a much better, faster and cheaper services or product. Sadly, the human element is one of the most difficult resources to manage as this element of the resources possesses the ability to control other elements.

The mistake most organizations make is that they have been able to successfully adjust resources such as finance and technology that has become business focus but neglect the need to ensure that the most important resource which is ‘humans’ requires ongoing adjustment to ensure that it remains business focus rather than activity driven. That being said, it is important for executives to understand why activities within an organization gear towards busyness rather than a business. Here are some of the reasons I have been able to come up with

Poor Planning and Communication

 Not having a plan in place that shows how the organization will ensure that everything within the organization (both human and non-human elements) is not just maximized to operate at full capacity but operate to focus on achieving the desired results that will contribute to helping the organization remain in business. Communication is important and most of the time, organizations fail in their business activities due to poor or lack of communication. It is absolutely crucial not just to have a plan in place but to ensure that the plan is carefully communicated using the most effective format through the right channel. To remain in business and gain more competitive advantage, you will need a good plan that is well communicated to the employees who will be implementing such a plan.

Lack of Skills

People within the organization can become busy without achieving tangible results. There is really nothing impressive about a busy office environment or employees when there is no result to show for it. Some employees might even spend more time than needed to complete a simple task because of a lack of skills needed to get the job done. In your organization, you should ensure that people who have been assigned to carry out specific task possesses the necessary skills to get the task done in order to make sure no time is being wasted in the process.

Lack of Training

Not having the necessary training is another reason many organizations are more activity driven than result-driven. So they are more in busyness than business. Empower your employees by training them. When employees know how to get the job done, they will spend less time on tasks.

Lack of Resources

There is nothing as frustrating for a skillful worker not to have the necessary tools needed to get the job done. This can also affect the level of motivation. Motivating an employee who is not motivated can be one of the hardest tasks to do. Trust is important when it comes to the employee-employer relationship.

Organization Culture

Sometimes, organizations might have the right people and tools needed to get the job done yet end up being in busyness rather than a business. The dominant culture at work in an organization can influence how serious people working within the organization handle task given to them. Organizations must encourage hard work, teamwork, and freedom to ask for help when needed. In doing this, the top management will have to take the lead role by first practicing the things they want other people working in the organization to do. Changing the culture of an organization will not happen overnight- It takes constant change reinforcement to correct unhealthy organization culture. People resist change especially one that threatens already established practices. If you have to change the culture within your organization, do not expect this to happen overnight- be patient enough to go through the process.

Poor Delegation

Some people working in an organization just will not want to delegate responsibility and will want to do everything by themselves. Such people are usually not team players and engage in such behavior for several reasons which could be that they are scared of asking for help or want to take all the credit for doing a wonderful job. Regardless of what the reason(s) might be, the organization must discourage such acts as that will not only lead to delay in achieving tasks but will increase stress level and deny other people in the organization to grow.

Procrastination and Poor Priority

Doing the right thing at the right time is one of the secrets to many successful organizations. We have seen this at work in Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Walmart, and many more. Timing is important in business. To ensure that your organization does not end up in busyness, the need for discouraging procrastination and clearly communicating the priority focus of the organization is important. Everybody within the organization should be clear of what the business wants to achieve and their roles in helping the organization achieve this goal. Encourage a culture that allows employees not to take up too many tasks that will lead to procrastination. Most of the time, tasks left undone will not just affect the organization financially but can create a toxic culture that can be hard to undo.

There are other reasons why organizations find themselves in busyness instead of business but the few points made here can help you kick start the process. The biggest setback for most organizations is not really lack of resources; rather it is having resources but not being able to deploy them in an effective and efficient manner to help the organization gain competitive advantage. So let your organization focus remains on doing business (providing better, faster, and cheaper services/product) and not busyness (engaging daily in activities that yield or add zero value to the customers).

I hope you find this useful. I will be happy to read your comment below. Thank you

 Image Source: Google Image

Digital Transformation Is About Talent, Not Technology

By Becky Frankiewicz and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

As The Economist recently noted, one of the most obvious consequences of the current Covid-19 pandemic will be “the infusion of data-enabled services into ever more aspects of life.” We expect digital transformation to be an even bigger imperative for organizations in the short-term future.

Contrary to popular belief, digital transformation is less about technology and more about people. You can pretty much buy any technology, but your ability to adapt to an even more digital future depends on developing the next generation of skills, closing the gap between talent supply and demand, and future-proofing your own and others’ potential.

As it turns out, most of us end up in jobs and careers for serendipitous reasons, and stay in them for a long time, rarely pausing to rethink our potential: Am I in the right job? Is my career the best fit for by interests and abilities? Would I enjoy my life more if I had chosen something else? Furthermore, while every job requires learning, we are prewired for familiarity, routine, and simplicity, which is why most of us end up learning less on the job, the more time we actually spend on the job. This is good in the short run, because we can do our jobs on autopilot, freeing up mental resources; yet it’s counterproductive in the long run, because what we gain in experience, we miss in new learning opportunities. An even bigger loss is that we may go through our entire working lives without discovering, let alone unlocking, our true potential. As Winston Churchill once said, we should never waste a good crisis. Perhaps this is the biggest gift of the current pandemic, that it provides us with the opportunity to rethink our potential and ensure that we are positioning ourselves toward the future. To be sure, it is too soon for most people to realize this, yet in the long-term, a significant number of people will likely end up in better careers and look back on their less meaningful and less engaging past careers like someone who looks back without regret on the end of a less fulfilling personal relationship, even one where it wasn’t their choice to exit.

With this in mind, we wanted to provide a few suggestions: some based on science, and some based on our own experiences leading, coaching, and mentoring current and future leaders across a wide range of industries, helping them ready themselves for an even-more-digital future. Our main assumption here is straightforward: While the future is more ambivalent and uncertain than ever, we are confident that a pretty strong bet on the future is to focus on reskilling and upskilling people so that they are better equipped to adjust to change. Just as our past efforts have enabled us to adapt to our more digital and virtual present world (and a non-trivial fact is that we are writing this, and you are probably reading this, in physical isolation), there are few reasons to suggest that this trend will go away or be reversed anytime soon. If anything, an even bigger proportion of jobs, tasks, activities, and careers will find ingenious and novel ways to coexist in the digital world. Here’s how we can all prepare for that eventuality:

• Put people first: Technology is always about doing more with less, yet that combination is effective only if you pair technology with the right human skills. Just as technological disruption has generally led to automation and the elimination of outdated jobs, it has also always created new jobs. This is why innovation is commonly described as creative destruction. But the creative aspect of innovation is entirely dependent on people. If we can leverage human adaptability to reskill and upskill our workforce, then we can simultaneously augment humans and technology. It’s really quite simple: the most brilliant innovation is irrelevant if we are not skilled enough to use it, and even the most impressive human minds will become less useful if they don’t team up with tech. The main implication is that when leaders think about investing in technology, they should first think about investing in the people who can make that technology useful.

• Focus on soft skills: Just as digital transformation is more about people rather than technology, the key technological skills are soft skills rather than hard skills. Sure, the recruitment market is hot for cybersecurity analysts, software engineers, and data scientists. But as we recently argued in our article, “Does Higher Education Still Prepare People for Jobs?”, there’s an even bigger need for people who can be trained in the next wave of IT skills. Paradoxically, higher education is always playing catch up, because where universities perceive employer demand, they follow up with relevant courses and learning programs, creating a future surplus of talent supply in those areas. In our view, the best way to make your organization more data-centric and digital is to selectively invest in those who are most adaptable, curious, and flexible in the first place. Since nobody knows what the key future hard skills will be, the best action is to bet on the people who are most likely to develop them. Our own talent development philosophy is to combine this dual focus on potential for soft skills, and knowledge for hard skills: we select people with high learnability (people with a hungry mind) and match their interests to in-demand skills, while understanding that those hard skills may soon become outdated — so the key is that their curiosity remains intact. Technical competence is temporary, but intellectual curiosity must be permanent.

• Drive change from the top: The idea of bottom-up or grassroots change is both romantic and intuitive, but in reality, change is much more likely to happen if you drive it from the top down. This does not mean that you have to embrace an autocratic or hierarchical structure, or that you need a culture of fear. In fact, it’s a simple matter of leadership, whether transactional or transformational. In the context of digital transformations, the main implication is that you cannot expect big changes or upgrades to your organization unless you start by selecting and developing your top leaders in that vein to begin with. It has never been clearer that leadership — both good and bad — cascades down to impact every single aspect of the organization, with as much as 50% of the variability in group or unit performance being attributable to the individual leader. This is why when we are asked about the single most important factor in determining the effectiveness of an organization’s transformation, our answer is always the same: the CEO or head of the firm. Sure, industry, context, culture, people, legacy, and actual tech all matter, just as resources do. Yet most of these things tend to be rather similar among direct competitors, whereas the mindset, values, integrity, and above all, competence of the most senior leaders will stand out and be the main differentiator. Needless to say, everything in business can be copied except for talent, so if you are looking for impact, do invest in top talent, which is where you will get the most value. The distinguishing feature in the war for talent is always leadership: in-demand skills such as software engineering are what we talk about, yet the key is to find the people who can manage the software engineers and get them to work as a team to outperform other software engineers.

• Make sure you’re acting on data insights: So much of the current discussion on data is focused on AI (artificial intelligence), or specific types of computer intelligence, such as machine learning, deep learning, or natural language processing. These powerful advances in AI are exciting, yet we don’t see them as the main differentiator for future-proofing your organization. A much bigger competitive advantage is to harness valuable data, having the necessary skills to translate that data into meaningful insights, and above all being able to act on those insights. In our view, data without insights are trivial, and insights without action are pointless. We cannot overemphasize the importance of this point, because too many business leaders operate under the false assumption that if they hire smart data scientists or buy fancy AI tools, their problems will go away, or they will somehow become more high-tech. The big difference between Google and the rest, between Amazon and the rest, between Facebook and the rest, is not the brain power of their data scientists, or the actual functionality of their technology (and, yes, we may see them as first-in-class), but their radical data-driven cultures. They have harnessed amazing data assets and have great algorithms to interpret (and monetize) that data, but their key strategic advantage and biggest asset is that they live, breathe, and act according to the data. Data truly is their oxygen, and that is something you cannot buy; you cultivate it, nurture it, and harness it with time — and above all, with leadership (back to point 3).

• If you can’t fail fast, make sure you succeed slowly: The statements that speed is king, that action is key, that perfect is the enemy of good, and that you should be willing and eager to fail fast, have all become clichés in management thinking. But, the only way to adapt to a constantly changing and rapidly disrupted present is to speed up and operate at pace. Of course, there is always a trade-off between speed and quality, so if you cannot fail fast enough — meaning you don’t have a culture in place that tolerates quick experiments with the view that the lessons learned from those failed experiences will make you stronger and smarter, then you need to be sure that your long-term bets are working out. In other words, it’s okay to succeed slowly if you can’t fail fast. At the end of the day, failure is only a strategy for getting to success in the long run, so if you pick another strategy, that’s fine — just make sure you can actually get there. However, remember that few things breed stagnation and a false sense of security like an obsession with success. Indeed, we often hear leaders rationalize their failures with a self-congratulatory “we have learned from our mistakes,” yet it’s much harder to learn from your successes.

As the last several weeks have demonstrated, we are agile as a global community. This agility has been people-led and technology-supported. Human beings are the common denominator to the concept of future proofing, whether it’s as a complement to the technology being unleashed for remote working, or whether it’s because we possess the soft skills and leadership needed to navigate a historic crisis, or because we have the insights needed to drive slow success or fast failure for a cure. It all starts with each and every one of us, and those we are responsible for developing. The key is to nurture curiosity, so we have options, even outside of a crisis.

Source: Harvard Business Review

About the Authors

Becky Frankiewicz is President of ManpowerGroup North America and a labor market expert. Before joining ManpowerGroup, she led one of PepsiCo’s largest subsidiaries, Quaker Foods North America, and was named by Fast Company as one of the most creative people in the industry. Find her on Twitter: @beckyfrankly. 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), upon which his TEDx talk was based. Find him on Twitter: @drtcp or at www.drtomas.com. 

Driving Innovation from Within

By Aaron Smith

What, in your experience, are the biggest barriers to driving an innovation from within?

This is the question Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff asked 150 “internal innovators”—employees leading innovation efforts within their organizations— over the course of three years while conducting research for his book, Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. He took their responses and then interviewed innovation experts such as Bharat Anand (Harvard), Steve Blank (Silicon Valley), George Day (Wharton), John Hagel (Deloitte’s Center for the Edge and Singularity University), Gary Hamel (London Business School), Roger Martin (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto), and Rita McGrath (Columbia) to capture their points of view.

His discovery: there are seven common barriers to innovation:

1. Intent: Many would-be internal innovators have simply given up trying; they have abandoned the intent to find and pursue new innovations.

2. Need: Most employees do not understand what kinds of innovations their organizations need (e.g., less than 55% of middle managers can name even two of their company’s top strategic priorities), so for ideas, they look in the wrong places and then propose ideas of little strategic value.

3. Options: Would-be internal innovators often grow frustrated because they become fixated too early on a few, or even worse just one, innovative idea, instead of continually generating a flow of new ideas and managing them like a portfolio of options.

4. Value blockers: It is commonly accepted that innovative ideas are inconsistent with, and therefore disruptive to, a company’s current business model. This established model creates erect value blockers that prevent an appropriate new business model from forming around the new idea.

5. Act: Established organizations tend to ask one to prove an idea will work before giving permission to take action. Yet most new ideas are better suited to the opposite approach: taking action in order to prove the idea. This puts would-be internal innovators in a catch-22: they cannot prove their idea will work so they cannot take action.

6. Team: Scaling new ideas often requires one to pull together a cross-silo team that runs at a rapid pace and is geared toward learning rather than delivering results. Corporations are geared for the opposite: they are siloed, act slowly, and value results (over learning).

7. Environment: Getting support for new ideas is politically complicated because the leadership behavior, types of talent, organizational structures, and cultural norms that help established organizations sustain their core operations also tend to hinder internal innovativeness. Would-be internal innovators struggle to find “islands of freedom” from which they can access the talent, structures, cultural norms, and leadership support that support attempts at innovation.

"Successful innovators understand that, while any one of the seven barriers can crop up at any time, there is usually a natural flow to the sequence of events, a sequence that outlines a pathway of innovation," says Krippendorff. “Their ability to recognize and control that sequence, to the greatest extent possible, plays a big role in their ultimate success. I also realized that if we turn those seven barriers around and look at the obverse, we see solutions.”

To that point, Krippendorff outlines seven steps to building an innovation team, each of which we have begun presenting in greater detail here on ProjectManagement.com:

1. Remove organizational friction: Walk through the five points of organization friction (resources, rewards/expectations, risk-taking, senior leadership support, and organizational freedom), and identify what you must do to address, or at least anticipate, each one.

2. Assemble a cross-functional team: Pull together a team of between five and ten people with the right mix of functional backgrounds, who are learners (high educational level) and unrestrained by accepted dogmas (low tenure). [see “Start Building an Innovation Team”]

3. Align around an important goal: Complete a V2MOM to align the team passionately behind a compelling shared vision, with an understanding of what specifically qualifies as winning and what obstacles you will face. [This acronym stands for: Vision, Value, Metrics, Obstacles and Measures—for a deeper dive, see “Build Team Commitment to a Goal”]

4. Use metrics and data to track the most important thing(s): Decide which leading metrics your team should focus on.

5. Build a scoreboard everyone can see: Decide on a display for your team and individual metrics.

6. Establish a rapid rhythm: Agree on the frequency with which you will review your team’s progress, and set an agenda for that meeting.

7. Generate positive velocity: Celebrate early wins; allow people to strive beyond what is easy by allowing for failure.

Whether you’re an executive, project manager or team member, these are great, actionable steps to support innovation efforts in your organization. And there’s also a great piece of advice to remember for each step of your innovation journey—from Gary Pisano, senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School and author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation:

“The all-or-nothing approach to solving problems makes for great theater. It does not, however, bear much resemblance to how actual big problems are solved in society, business, or science. Big problems typically get tackled through a series of small solutions, each of which on its own may not seem particularly important, but that together can have a huge impact.

“We need to be thinking about a big set of ‘small’ solutions rather just a small set of ‘big’ solutions.”

Source: Projectmanagement.com

Image Source: Google