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How Do You Reinvent Your Enterprise?
July 09, 2009
When you're not making money, and you have employees to pay and investors and customers to make happy, it's hard accepting your company for what it is. Maybe you don't need acceptance of the status quo. Maybe what's called for is corporate reinvention.
Jack Bergstrand, author of "Reinvent Your Enterprise," anticipates your questions about his book, and provides some answers:
Who should read "Reinvent Your Enterprise" and why?
People who aren't satisfied with their organizational results will benefit from "Reinvent Your Enterprise." Peter Drucker, the father of management, continually emphasized the need for adopting a new approach, and doing that is the purpose of this book. There is no question management practices that used to be the solution are now—in many cases—the problem.
What do you mean management systems that used to be the solution are now the problem?
The management system we all learned in school is based on scientific management—which quantitatively breaks manual works into pieces and increases efficiency through standardization. Most people now work in areas often described as "knowledge work" and use ideas, expertise, information, and relationships to get work done. The purely objective approach of scientific management has proven to be insufficient with this type of work because knowledge work is much more social in nature.
What's an example of the problem?
One example is the failure rate of large enterprise projects. Large technology projects, for instance, fail 70 percent of the time. There is no question these types of projects are critical for competitive advantage. Unfortunately, companies and consultants often implement rigorous project management techniques that then get derailed over time by the human side of the knowledge work equation.
Non-strategic cost-cutting campaigns are another example. With knowledge work, cost-cutting does not drive productivity. Reinvention does. It's not enough for companies to tighten belts. We need to redesign our structures for sustainable competitive advantage in the "Knowledge Age."
What do you mean by reinvention?
Reinvention focuses on productively adapting to and capitalizing on the future—and requires the combination of doing the right things and doing them right. To use what you have to get what you don't have but intend to get. On the other end of the spectrum, re-engineering and other quantitative restructuring methods focus more on the efficiency side of the equation—on doing the old things at a lower cost. This only improves productivity if the old things are still the right things in a changing marketplace.
What drives reinvention?
To succeed in the knowledge work age, sustainable reinvention will require people think of their enterprises holistically as if they were their corporate brands and then improve their company's velocity through accelerated enterprise projects. This requires the combination of three ongoing achievements: implementing successful capabilities that never existed before, improving or expanding capabilities that are already successful, and stopping capabilities that are no longer successful.
How does "Reinvent Your Enterprise" help?
This book helps people improve their results—better, faster, and cheaper—in today's knowledge work age. It integrates the ideas of Peter Drucker and more than 100 other great thinkers and gives readers a systematic way to succeed faster and do it on a more sustainable basis.
What can people do right away to improve their results?
The first thing is to take a more holistic and systematic approach to your work and your organization. Specialization improves the visible and stable nature of manual work productivity but integration drives the invisible and ever-changing nature of knowledge work.
With respect to improvement areas, my favorites include innovating with customers versus for them, developing a winning product-service menu, creating an asset-less mindset, reinventing enterprise technology projects, and the power of coaching versus training.
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