What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try to innovate.
Sam Altman – Programmer and Investor
All companies, even global corporations, have discovered they can’t be all things to all VUCANs. As companies attempted to please different customers with a large variety of products, problems arose. Resources were spread too thin so a company could only do certain things moderately well. The wise decision was to focus and develop ‘world class’, core process competencies. There’s a good business reason for this.
Process orientation involves a change of mindset, a personal disruption in how you perceive and approach work. A process orientation is a paradigm shift away from the functional and hierarchal to a horizontal model of business. A process orientation involves these interrelated factors:
- Structure. A core process is smooth, balanced, structured, seamless, value-adding, replicable, efficient, effective, and economic. The process has a beginning and an end. It consists of a number of value-adding steps, each of which has a customer and a supplier.
- Layout. A process orientation is a horizontal, end-to-end view of work. A process may cut across an organization into the supplier base and even to the final customer. A process can span different functions, plants, and departments throughout the organization. Process orientation seems to work well in matrixed organizations.
- Accountability. A project team or self managed individual is responsible for a process step or even for the entire process from beginning to end. In process language, this accountability is called process ownership and self management.
Work Lesson Earned: The closer an employee or manager is to the core, the easier it’s to demonstrate long-term value. But, closer to the core means that functions will be the first to be automated.