Initiatives

Look at new initiatives to increase revenue growth and keep improving business effectiveness, efficiency, and achieve high-performance business results with consistency.

Organizations are faced with huge pressures to survive due to complexity, uncertainty, and fierce competition. In fact, business ecosystems are complex, behaving by way of interactions among the various constituents. 

Organizations that thrive on managing strategic planning - action -effect cycle with consistency are excellent at maintaining business growth momentum and achieving higher-than-expected business results. The actionable one-page initiative plan should incorporate:

Organizational strategic initiatives are the vehicle for achieving strategic goals; and build a unique set of business competency: It is an important perspective for senior executives to build a solid business initiative program portfolio by pondering around: How successful is business strategy implementation? What are smart actions they can take to compete to win today? How will such actions help to compete and win going forward? They should say no to many of the initiatives and just choose a few where they will put most of the resources, talent to implement smoothly, take smart actions, and improve the success rate of business initiatives.

Collaboration is about aligning people, process, technology, and managing them holistically to improve business initiative effectiveness: To break down old school silos of thoughts, perceptions, and traditional management, visionary leadership, cross-functional communication, collaboration, transparency, etc, are the keys to harness interdisciplinary management disciplines. Collaboration creates a sense of belonging, seeking out help and harnessing mass collaboration.

The emerging digital technologies such as enterprise social computing could be effective tools to break down overly rigid hierarchical culture, build up an effective workplace in which collaboration and sharing are the norms, focusing on harnessing cross-functional collaboration through iterative communications, robust processes, and efficient technological tools, to achieve multifaceted business values.

Accountability is a part of professional integrity, it goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power: If you ensure the individuals have the autonomy within their tasks for co-solving business problems, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership basis. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication and strong teamwork. Accountability chains can be enforced by agreement of management and employees at the different layers of organizational hierarchy, to advocate the digital style of autonomy and self-management. Digital leaders with accountability have the right dose of risk appetite and the good attitude to manage risks in a structural way. Accountability can be harnessed by motivating employees to achieve higher than expected results and build the culture of learning, trust, and risk-taking.

A scoreboard is a great way of selecting, scoping, and aligning specific initiatives to overall strategic objectives: A balanced scorecard provides business objectives/metrics and drivers, facilitate information-based communication and performance review, and measure the progress of the strategic goals you want to achieve. It translates the strategy into concrete terms and helps to track strategy implementation in a measurable way. As people can see what the outcome will look like throughout the transition, the scorecard helps you a lot when it is in execution mode, not in paper mode. It helps to connect key performance indicators on the strategic level to the operational KPIs so that there is a coherent truth in the company connected to the strategy.

To operate a highly responsive organization, the management needs to strike the right balance of building strategic competency and operational excellences of the company, take fact-based “smart actions” in a consistent way, look at new initiatives to increase revenue growth and keep improving business effectiveness, efficiency, and achieve high-performance business results with consistency.

Posted in: Execution,Strategy