"Sustainable organizational success" by Ruud Koehorst

The advice below is based on some 15 years of practical experience and valuable professional literature, study materials and experiences. I'm sure there are more. But all in all it is a nice inventory, which we offer you for inspiration.

As a first introduction and token of appreciation for visiting our website.

Reduce complexity

• Make sure your corporate values and guiding principles are clear. This will prevent doubt and directionlessness in the current dynamics.
• Test the limits of what is allowed to you as a company. Not to go over them, but to make full use of the limited room for manoeuvre your organisation has.
• In all organisational activities, try to gain and maintain the trust of your environment(s).
• Innovation has never emerged from risk-averse behaviour. Be transparent, be prepared to make mistakes and allow practically anyone into your kitchen at practically any time.
• Develop your employees, but with a goal in mind (the company values).
• Put your customers first. That means not putting every customer first; only your customers.

Activate management

• Create a management that reserves time and space for abstraction and creativity, in collaboration with others. Mere operational successes are never the main source of subsequent operational successes. By no means everything needs a deadline, and the nine-minute manager never makes it to the tenth minute in which a piece of reflection can take place.
• Let your management often look at businesses that have nothing to do with your markets.
• Let your management move to secrecy only when absolutely necessary. Also provide middle and operational management with sufficient skills to transmit policies with transparency.
• Let your management create a culture where hard work is the most natural thing in the world (because it always was). But don't let this culture degenerate into working from 6am to 10pm. That has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with hard work. Rather, it is a harbinger of lack of competence and an approaching financial valley (or ravine).
• Make your management change managers piece by piece. Make sure they do not accept things staying as they are. Constantly challenge procedures, structures and processes.
• Let your management encourage constructive struggles between departments. No half-hearted agreements turned into vague Service Level Agreements. Your organisation should be an arena of the battle of understandings, with common principles as the basis.
• Train your employees in how to communicate effectively among themselves and treat each other respectfully. You will fall from one cost saving into another.

Choose added value and vision

• Your organisation should know the game; master a pricing strategy from A to Z. Then make an unambiguous choice: either a focus on price, or not! Above all, don't make half choices, because then your margin and added value will irrevocably spiral downwards.
• In principle, creating added value has a clear relationship with originality and innovation. If your added value depends on how well you can copy your competitor, you could end up in a bad way. After all, your competitor often only develops products because you are doing it too.
• Know your environments and markets, but remain your own boss. If necessary, seek out new environments and keep exploring the boundaries.
• For innovation, you need your own employees more than ever. Commitment and fostering the lust for success, are key. Enter into alliances only when you are ready. After all, earlier co-creation means something like developing bacon & eggs with another person, where the other person is the chicken and you are the bacon! (And for whom is this alliance most painful?)
• Shareholders, take it or leave it, but this is our strategy and these are our choices!
• Ask the right questions of your buyers. Asking the wrong questions leads to development of the wrong products and services. This sounds so logical, but then why do 80% of all product launches fail?
• Recognise that your organisation may be full of dated insights. Which play tricks on you within any team that gets to work on innovation and product and service development. The more experienced the people and the greater their expertise, the more an innovation path will take major detours, along seemingly dead ends. Therefore, make sure there is a standard review of whether insights about operation and manufacturability are also current.

© Ruud Koehorst, 2009