Thursday, September 1, 2022

Initiatives

Business initiative management is crucial to build business capabilities, improve risk intelligence, and avoid pitfalls for leading long term business success.

We live in a dynamic environment with information exponentiality and unprecedented uncertainty. Organizations have limited resources and budget, business management needs to take initiatives for driving changes. 

There are functional initiatives and cross functional initiatives, quick win or long run focused initiatives, etc. It is important to plan comprehensively, keep the “big picture” in mind, set the right priority, and take business initiatives that can differentiate the organization from its major competitors. identifying what generates the most value for the company.
 
Initiatives with strategic impact: Every business initiative is to solve problems large or small, “being strategic” is about keeping the end in mind, embracing emerging business properties, making transformative change from influencing people’s mindset to driving desired attitude and behaviors. High-impactful business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving crucial problems or the chains of problems effectively. For strategic business initiatives, a vision provides the guiding light and direction; a business case provides the description and reason for starting such an initiative to solve large scale complex problems, defining the scope, and making an objective business requirements assessment.

Leaders in the industrial age often apply silo thinking and linear logic to business initiatives management. To make strategic impact, business leaders must accelerate their thinking, broaden their vision, clarify nonlinear logic behind change, define the scope, specification of business initiatives. It's important to gain top executives’ sponsorship, collect stakeholders’ requirements, align business resources, talent, information technology, and process to do in-depth analysis of how the "initiative" impacts people and strategy in the organization from long term perspective and orchestrate change smoothly.

Initiatives to accelerate business growth: We cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Besides keeping business running as usual, accelerating organizational growth is always at the top of forward-looking business executives’ agenda. Uncertainty per se is not a problem, it poses a risk for those who have a fixed mindset and creates opportunities for those with a growth mindset. Take business initiatives that can explore emerging opportunities, design new business models, investigate different paths for accelerating business growth and unleashing organizational potentiality.

Business managers should practice the art and science of leadership, take an intrapreneur spirit to accelerate business growth, and deal with uncertainty smoothly. It’s no surprise that there is tension between old and new business models. You need a methodological mainframe that allows you to do that, develops and tests new models, products, and business approaches, and leaps business initiative management to the next level of maturity.

Initiatives to enhance GRC:
There needs to have both top-down and bottom-up (consensus) approach to governance for it to be effective and accepted. In many organizations, much of risk and compliance is reactive in the sense that there is a lot of rushing around trying to fix problems after they have occurred. Overly controlled governance perhaps decreases the natural balance of the business ecosystem. Lack of governance effectiveness will expose the business to the high risk environment. The flavor of GRC practices depends on the nature of the business and the level of the organizational maturity. The effective governance initiatives should strengthen ecosystem alignment and optimize business manageability.

To enhance GRC effectiveness and improve organizational maturity, it’s important to set up governance initiatives in an organization for identifying those common risks which various stakeholders in the organization have to deal with and aim to minimize; including varying governance activities such as delegation of authority, auditing, or strategy monitoring, etc, to steering business in the right direction with premium speed, improve business effectiveness and maturity.

Business initiative management is crucial to build business capabilities, improve risk intelligence, and avoid pitfalls for leading long term business success. There's nothing to be done about an uncontrollable situation although the management can truly have a humble attitude to collect feedback, and do enough homework for planning and investing. Prioritization brings transparency; creating healthy competition among initiatives to stimulate innovation, improve employee productivity, delight customers by producing intuitive products/services, optimize processes or cost, and build unique business competency.


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