The leaders of great companies are not just great at growing profits. Most importantly, they are organizational architects determined to establish institutional excellence for as long as the company is in business. Institutional excellence is a sustainable competitive advantage that enables your business to survive against your competition over a long period of time. When institutional excellence is in place, companies can achieve industry leadership for decades and generations.

Achieving right balance between whole and parts

One of the major issues in all organizations is getting the right balance between the whole and the parts – the needs of the organization as a whole, the needs of its internal groups, and individual needs of its members. This in turn is a reflection of deeper tensions between the values of order and freedom. They appear to be opposites, but the true function of order is to create freedom.

The extent to which organization operates as a network of relationships enables individuals to make sense of their work and their world, and will strongly influence the coherence of the organization and its sense of purpose. Such purpose can only be grounded in the coherence and meaningfulness of people's work to themselves, their colleagues and their customers.

Successful organizations must also balance bureaucratic processes at one extreme with the fluid creative chaos of relationships, interests and transactions, which enable it to be innovative and alive, at the other.

The new-generation adaptive organization

Adaptive organization is a new third-stage organization based upon radically new logics of content, configuration, and change based on human capabilities rather than limitations. The three new logics for adaptive organizations include:

New logic of content: requires that concepts of strategy, structure, and systems are broadened to include a greater emphasis on human values, goals, capabilities, and efficacy.
New logic of configuration: specifies a new relationship among strategy, structure, and systems that gives priority to supporting workforce engagement and capability.
New logic of change: asserts that people seek meaning in work through accomplishment and contribution to shared organization goals, and specifies a top-down-bottom-up sequence of development activities.

Process-managed enterprise

Business Process Management System (BPMS) creates a foundation for your enterprise architecture. By acquiring BPMS your company can gain unprecedented control of the management of your business processes, supplementing your existing systems and accelerating the achievement of your business objectives.

The growing role of business architect

In today's knowledge - and innovation-driven complex economy, business architects are in growing demand. To build a winning synergistically integrated organization, companies need cross-functionally excellent people who can tie several silos of business development expertise together, create synergies, design a winning business model and a balanced business system and then lead people who will put their plans into action.

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Sources of your sustainable competitive advantage

Sustainable competitive advantage enables business to survive against its competition over a long period of time. An intelligent and integrated human resources strategy is the most important source of sustainable competitive advantage.

Managerial leadership

Leadership is the necessary condition for long-term competitiveness. In particular in the knowledge economy, what is proving to be most effective is the emerging style of values-based leadership, both as motivation for constant innovation up and down all organization levels and as a source of unity and coherence across fragmented firm boundaries. Harnessing your abilities to lead through the power of intellect, will, persistence and vision creates synergies that propel successful companies in the quest for, and achievement of, competitive advantage.

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Trust-based working relationships

Trust has an important link with your organizational success. Trust-based working relationships are an important source of your sustainable competitive advantage because trust is valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and often nonsubstitutable. Trust elevates levels of commitment and sustains effort and performance without the need for management controls and close monitoring. When trust exist, it is less necessary for firms to establish formal contracts to specify expected actions and interaction patterns. In addition, when parties trust one another, it less necessary for the firm to rely on organizational structures to monitor and control individual and group behaviors.

Employee empowerment

A successful corporation must be able to craft a new partnership-based relationship with its employees – it must be able to live the ideals of people power, rather than merely talk about them.

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Establishing an attitude of relentless growth

Establishing an attitude of relentless growth is what enables an organization and its people to achieve their goals. The spirit of relentless growth keeps fresh ideas flowing and reinvigorates your company.

The Relentless Growth Attitude establishes a context within which corporate executives lead by setting direction, creating strategy, securing resources, defining organization architecture, and ensuring that learning occurs. The Growth Attitude should start at the top and work its way down your organization.

Cross-functional teams

To face today's complex challenges, you need to incorporate a wide range of styles, skills, and perspectives.

While separate departments help to develop deep knowledge in each functional area, they also make it difficult to coordinate activities across departmental boundaries. Organizations often establish cross-functional teams to deal with this dilemma. Cross-functional teams will also help you to lead innovation and change through your organization.

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Continuous corporate renewal

For a manager, acceptance of the status quo is deadly. In business, nothing is ever truly fixed or complete because its very aspect is a work in progress.

Learning organization

The learning organization is an organization which facilitates the learning of all its members and continuously transforms itself.

The amount of knowledge is doubling every 7 to 10 years.13 This hastens the obsolescence of skills and knowledge. The shelf life of academic degrees has been estimated to be only one year for computer science, two years for electrical engineering, and four years for business studies. Training and skills development must therefore be a continuous process. Excellent companies spend about 4-5% of payroll on training and devote an average of 40-50 training hours per employee per year.

Learning bottom-up

"As managers, our obligation is to listen and act, putting the knowledge resources of our employees to work by enhancing connectivity", says Desmond Bonnar from Thames Water. "In this way we can expand options and remain ahead of the learning curve that is the inevitable by-product of change."

How to bring about effective change

Change creates opportunities, but only for those who recognize and seize it. Successful change efforts are those where the choices both are internally consistent and fit key external and situational variables. You have to find subtle ways to introduce change, new concepts, and give feedback to people so that they can accept and grow with it.

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Road-mapping your organizational fitness profile (OFP)

The Organizational Fitness Profile (OFP) can help to x-ray your organization, identify its weaknesses, and take corrective action in order to achieve optimal performance. The OFP process starts with the top management team developing a "Statement of Strategic and Organizational Direction" in order to communicate and explain the logic behind the strategy. After the statement is issued, a task force composed of middle managers from different functions or businesses is appointed to collect information from inside and outside organization about specific management practices that help or hinder the implementation of specific strategies. The data collected by the task force enable the top management to analyze the organization's effectiveness. A plan is then established jointly by the top management and the task force to implement this new organizational vision.

80/20 theory of the firm

The key theme of the 80/20 Principle applied to business is how to create the greatest stakeholder value and generate most money with the least expenditure of assets and efforts. The game is to spot the few places where you are making great surpluses – be that a product, a market, a customer type, a technology, a distribution channel, a department, a country, a type of transaction, an employee or a team - and to maximize them; and to identify the places where you are loosing and get out.

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Winning business organization: General Electric

Today General Electric (GE) succeeds in dozens of diverse businesses and is continuously at the vanguard of change. Some years ago however, in locations throughout GE, local managers were operating in an insulated environment with walls separating them, both horizontally and vertically, from other departments and their workforce. Employee questions, initiatives, and feedback were discouraged.

Determined to harness the collective power of GE employees, create a free flow of ideas, and redefine relationships between boss and subordinates, Jack Welch, the former legendary CEO of GE, created a new corporate culture. It's key elements are:

Redesigning the role of the leader in the new economy: creating followers through communicating a vision, and establishing open, caring relations with every employee.
Creating an open, collaborative workplace where everyone's opinion is welcome.
Empowering senior executives to run far-flung businesses in entrepreneurial fashion.
Liberating the workforce; making everybody a participant through improving vertical communication and employee empowerment.

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Winning Business Organization

Business Guide : Winning Business Organization

Why institutional excellence?