Business Balance Cycle

To stay competitive, forward-looking organizations have to manage both the balancing cycle and growth cycle smoothly by exploring the new possibility and building business competencies to perform in the future.

 

organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to manage, lead, yet most important to execute timely. Thinking outside the current constraints and comfort zones requires a different vision and the courage to pursue it. Thus, business leaders today need to envision and understand the holistic picture via different lenses. In a way, we are destined to look forward, and in doing so, see both the past and the future in front of us, but the past and future are held in balance by “now.” 

It takes courage, confidence, and intelligence to overcome the “fear of failure” and take smart actions. A part of a business system emits more energy than it is normally supposed to, that is going beyond the linear response of the part, things become interwoven, and in many circumstances, business leaders have to strike the right balance by hybridifying, and make right choices by discernment in order to make a seamless paradigm shift.

Stretchy goals vs. fundamental duties are hybridified by holistic management: Nowadays, planning is dynamic and business management is nonlinear, transaction and transformation are two sides of the same coin. Transaction-driven operational management may be viewing things from a single side internally, and transformation-driven strategic management takes a holistic view of things both internally and externally. So many companies pursue the “hybrid truth”- stability & dynamism by managing two seperate but coherent delivery modes. One focuses on the fundamental management responsibility for supporting; the other drives transformative changes boldly.

Each organization needs to adopt the well-proven strategic planning models focusing on setting specific goals and objectives right to achieve business strategy step by step in a measurable way. 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. The capital and resource allocation (money, focus, time, and people) commitment will be fuzzy until the key challenges are understood and agreed upon. A high performing business can manage both their talent and resources effectively via prioritization, optimization, and mapping strategic business goals to functional goals to individual employees’ goals to ensure smooth alignment. There is a lot of evidence that people can't stay focused for long periods of time or focus on too many goals. If you give them too little time, there's a risk of sacrificing quality and making people overly stressed. But if you give them too much time, their sense of urgency falls and the manager's vigilance will be compromised too. So the art of management is to balance the stretchy goals vs. fundamental duties well, let employees make their dish without micromanagement, as the way of coming up with actions that will improve organizational performance and conformance in order to achieve the set goals.

Implicit vs. explicit are rationalized by critical thinking and knowledge management: Knowledge is power. Besides updated explicit knowledge we all share in the hyperconnected digital society, the right culture with implicit knowledge or organization value is a critical success factor to keep the business system running smoothly, with the goal to build a digital-savvy organization. In practice, implicit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of verbalizing it. Consider the effort of critical thinking as training your mind to seek reason, both explicit and implicit knowledge to reframe its approach to a conundrum in a certain way.

People don't know what they know until they need to know it. Individuals can use explicit knowledge and generate the tacit knowledge embedded in explicit knowledge. Since tacit knowledge is highly personal and based on observation and experience, it is hard to collect or document. In the organizational setting, the challenge is developing a set of replicable steps for capturing tacit and implicit knowledge and turning it into explicit knowledge that can be accessed by an entire enterprise when needed. Tacit knowledge has to flow in response to an organizational need. With emerging digital technologies, use of collaboration tools can convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. A thoughtful and structural knowledge management solution needs to explore the breadth and depth of knowledge, its prospects and practice to improve the collective learning capability and organize knowledge into true understanding.

Competition and collaboration are harmonized by “trust & control”: We live in the hyperconnect business world with the wide adoption of the concepts such as “coorpetion,” “friendenemy,” etc. Both mass collaboration and construction competition are important to rejuvenate our digital economy. Healthy and professional competitions are about winning with purposes; cross-boundary collaboration improves organizational agility and maturity. Once the leadership starts to understand and advocate such digital philosophy, its mindset changes from that of the limitation to the possibility, and it becomes ready to create or nurture an inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution, the working environment becomes more healthier and creative.

Many organizations today are running in between - the mix of old and new; the different divisions within an organization evolve changes with different speed. Balance between the two actions- competition & collaboration are underpinned by Trust and Control. Coopetition (cooperation + competition) is perhaps the right approach for running a highly energetic and collaborative digital business. To encourage positive competitions and discourage negative competitions, the digital rule of thumb is how to leverage energy in a more meaningful way; not for beating down the competitors, but for living with purpose, strengthening the strength, unleashing talent potential, and running a successful business.

To stay competitive, forward-looking organizations have to manage both the balancing cycle and growth cycle smoothly by exploring the new possibility and building business competencies to perform in the future. The top business management needs to be open minded enough to evolve change and cautious enough to pinpoint pitfalls, finding a vision reflecting the “mind and soul” of the company to accelerate business transformation via continuous balance cycles of participation, adaptability, expansion, innovation, and optimization.

Posted in: Digital Balance,Hybrid