Competing in a Flat World: Seven Ways To Transform Your Organization

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Competing in a Flat World: Seven Ways To Transform Your Organization

How quickly is your market changing? Are you able to keep up?

If you are like many executives, you are deeply concerned about the many changes that are “flattening” our world. Remaining competitive in a flat world is a formidable challenge — it means being able to learn and innovate at the speed of change in the marketplace. Organizations using 20th century models won’t survive. In order to remain competitive, you need to make wholesale changes in the way you live, work and learn, both as individuals and as organizations.

Fortunately, there are organizations already leading the way. We have studied in-depth what they are doing successfully, and have worked with them as they undergo truly remarkable transformations. Based on this work, which is built upon over twenty years of university research and application in the field, we have identified the following seven critical steps for transforming your organization into an Enterprise of the Future:

1. Align Business Processes and Technology with Strategy

• Perform top-to-bottom organizational review

• Identify performance drivers having greatest impact on mission and strategy

• Link key processes to performance drivers

• Identify enablers for enhancing key processes and overall performance

AKStrategist^TM

2. Capture and Grow Your Institutional Knowledge

• Identify decisions most critical to mission success

• Identify top performers in mission critical areas

• Model decision processes and best practices of top performers

AKCapture^TM

• Organize your knowledge so you can find it, and share it with others

• Eliminate randomness, and simplify the complex

AKTaxonomist^TM

• Identify key knowledge elements and relationships (“connect the dots”)

AKMapper^TM

3. Choose the Right Tools; Use the Tools You Already Have More Effectively

• Inventory key, knowledge-intensive work processes

• Identify greatest strengths, opportunities, and risks impacting your institutional knowledge

• Recommend specific approaches for boosting knowledge workforce performance

AKCheckup^TM

4. Streamline Your Decision Processes

• Reduce costly decision-making errors

• Make critical decisions faster, more consistently

DecisionXLerator^TM

5. Boost Knowledge Worker Productivity

• Improve responsiveness by communicating decisions clearly and quickly

ReportXLerator^TM

6. Become a Knowledge-Sharing Enterprise

• Change the way your organization thinks about work
• Every individual becomes a leader/contributor in their area

AKLeader^TM

• Develop a well-defined process for capturing and growing institutional knowledge on a large scale

• Execute consistently

• Periodically review and refine strategic objectives and process improvements

AKMentor^TM

7. Measure, Track, and Improve Performance

• Create alignment across mission, strategy, performance drivers, core capabilities, key processes, and people

• Establish clearly defined links between capabilities and bottom line performance

• Prioritize and allocate resources in areas having the greatest impact on overall performance

Digital Dashboards

We have developed a simple, yet powerful diagnostic tool to help you get started. It identifies key areas in which you can immediately begin the transformation process. By measurably increasing the speed at which your organization responds to changes in the market, you will be well on your way to building sustainable competitive advantage in a “flat,” rapidly changing world.

To learn more about how you can become an Enterprise of the Future, please contact our EVP for Client Services, Jeff Lesher.

See examples of specific product applications

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