What successful organisations need
Given the rate of technological change over the past century, it’s hardly surprising that organisations are experiencing shifts in management style and structure. While management was traditionally organised in top-down hierarchies to maintain control, consistency, and predictability, the internet has made these structures irrelevant by demanding change, fluidity and adaptability.
Organisations of today will succeed over time if they adapt to the speed and nature of external change and maintain built-in fluidity to adapt. To do this, they must harness the power of data and algorithms. This is where KDZA can assist. This Harvard Business Review article tracks the history of the organisation, detailing the historic shifts that have brought us to where we are now, which offers insights on what needs to be offered moving forward.
In summary:
Organisations of the past
About a century ago, Henry Ford built a highly successful business through top-down management and assembly line mass production. The key was to create standardised processes and speed up the production of vehicles, while lowering costs.
This change was adopted by other corporations until Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., CEO of General Motors (GM), decided to capitalise further by making multiple models of cars designed to suite different budgets and introduced “divisions that each had a leader responsible for profit and loss”.
After World War II, companies grew even larger and extended their sales, production and supplier networks across the globe, leading to matrix arrangements “in which reporting relationships and accountability were shared across product, functional, and geographic structures”.
And then came the internet
In the 1990s, the internet changed everything. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, was one of the early leaders to understand that with the internet came the age of discontinuity and an end to the prevailing organisational structures and practices. Amazon learnt to exploit the ‘new’, by understanding the following trends:
1. From mass market to markets of one
Online retailers can offer far more choices than a brick-and-mortar shop and include the convenience of delivery. Affordable personalised and convenient service are the new value proposition. What’s more, these transactions provide data to better tailor future offerings.“
Businesses that use technology to predict and personalise what a vast number of individuals want at low incremental cost, can scale up and increase cash gross margins.”
2. From building on core competencies to routinely replacing them
Leaders today need to consider whether their core competence are still relevant, given the changing external realities.Amazon realised this when it adopted a new core competency in using algorithms data analytics and e-commerce.
“Recruiting the right people and deploying them in ways that allow them to apply their expertise and energy are core competencies themselves and critical in the age of discontinuity. In an escalating war for talent, businesses that are the most skilled in acquiring and developing these competencies will have a distinct competitive advantage.”
3. From hierarchical layers to a team-based structure
Companies need to consider reducing the hierarchical layers and focus on teams to increase accurate information flow and greater flexibility to respond to customer and market changes. The improved flow of information also creates transparency that removes a lot of organisational politics.
KDZA’s success formula
By offering automation and ECM, KDZA and our partners have been building the structures and processes that take advantage of the new external reality for a while now. The key to our success has been to remain vigilant and continue to embrace change through agility and innovation.
Yunus Docrat - Service Operations Manager - KYOCERA Document Solutions South Africa
