Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Initiative & Involvement

Business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets.


Change is inevitable. Running a business today is an iterative planning-action continuum. High performance organizations take business initiatives proactively and drive continuous progress steadfastly. 

Change is never for its own sake, any business initiative, especially change, should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving employee productivity, delighting customers, optimizing costs or improving business products/services/processes. 



Compelling business cases describe the business initiative’s benefits and costs flow: A business case provides the description and reason for starting an initiative. You need to take a fast, hard look at the business case that justifies the program you are engaged in or spending assets on. It is important to be as comprehensive as possible in monetizing costs flows. Estimating cost scientifically provides a good reason to move things forward if it’s within the budget; but too-optimistic cost projections perhaps seed doubts about an initiative in others’ minds. It’s also important to be as conservative as possible in identifying and monetizing benefits flows as too-ambitious benefits flows are easily countered. You also need to emphasize that it is insufficient to simply communicate an initiative’s promised benefits, because these benefits must be delivered.

Every opportunity has risk in it. Lack of commitment and support should be seen as a significant uncertainty and should be reflected as such in your risk assessment for the program, attaching believable dollar values to identify benefits flows. For strategic business initiatives, a vision provides the guiding light and direction, it’s also important to clarify strategic goals. Unclear goals or too many variables attached to it make it more confusing. It’s also helpful if analyzing potential pitfalls such as, fail to build cohesive and differentiated business competencies; mismatch in requirement from a role and expertise of the candidate; management ignoring the external environment or business ecosystem affecting the business, etc. A strong business case enables the management to make effective decisions and leads logical actions to reach customers’ expectations.

Culture determines the initiation of corrective action to create sustainable competitive advantages: In business, every day is a risk and the risk curve will always be greater than a business as usual approaches. Any business initiative involves a certain degree of risk in it, culture is a determinant upon how effectively the business initiative can create sustainable business value. With a risk-tolerant and high performance culture, managers will see quantitative results and be able to praise or take corrective actions quicker. As culture, organizational alignment and communication, employee involvement and buy-in are all critical elements in leading business initiatives successfully.

To initiate changes effectively and continuously, decide on how you will change your behaviors and workplace environment and then act. Compliment your actions with constructive feedback to make continuous improvement. If the goals are scoped right, prioritized right and aligned with the strategic needs of the organization, you'll see more things get done sooner which creates energy, enthusiasm, and momentum. Actions are incredibly clear and very consistently interpreted. So the organization is at the healthy growth cycle - to listen to the organization - to change your behavior - to try something new - to act, to inspire positive change in those around you…

Diversification is a component and in some cases a very good initiation of value creation:
Modern organizations are the living system of interdependence and hyper-diversity. You need conflict to initiate, but after initiation, there should be the brainstorming to create, and coherent capability to implement. Diversification and differentiation make the business stand out by allowing the organization to close innovation bottlenecks and develop the unique business competencies. If the strategic initiative has a strong talent component and “soft” culture factor to it, top business leaders must get involved to make sure culture fit to implement the capability based strategy.

Strong business initiatives advocate diversity; diversification stimulates change and sparks creativity. In such a global climate, leaders should work with the right mindset to recreate an inclusive organization with every dip in the business life cycle, always look for the capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other to achieve successful outcomes, whether financial, brand, or double bottom line. Business value is demonstrated through the rate of productivity increases, the rate of new product development, the rate of market share gains, the rate of customer approval and satisfaction gains, the rate of sales gains, etc.

Business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets. Across multiple organizational silos, you need to manage large scale change initiatives via a good alignment of innovators, disruptive technologies, rigorous processes and hybrid structures to accelerate business performance and improve organizational maturity.



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