Keeping Business Transformation Dynamic

Our world today is characterised by unprecedented uncertainty, with tools like artificial intelligence redefining the role of human capital. Meanwhile, historically accepted socio-economic models, like globalisation, democracy, the role of nation states, etc., are no longer immune to questioning. In their book Revolutionizing Business Operations: How to Build Dynamic Processes for Enduring Competitive Advantage, authors Tony Saldanha and Filippo Passerini explore the formula for sustained excellence that companies, governments and non-profit organisations can look to.

Saldanha and Passerini argue that most organisations indulge in episodic business transformations when things get tight, like restructures, IT systems implementations, productivity drives and layoffs, etc. Their book presents a model, called dynamic process transformation model, along with a checklist on how to achieve continuous business process transformation.

An excerpt:

The issue with the business processes of every company—in operations of product development, production, manufacturing, sales, finance, information technology, human resources, and so on—is that they quickly become obsolete due to ongoing changes in the marketplace, technology, or capabilities. These business processes grow more complex, rigid, and siloed over time. That sets up a dangerous sequence of events, as follows. 

1. Business processes become obsolete. 
2. One-off transformation programs are kick-started to reengineer, standardize, or automate processes. However, these rely on having the right prime mover to sense and sponsor this change. 
3. Business transformation programs, even if initiated, fail to deliver 70% of the time. 
4. Meanwhile, if an economic crisis, industry disruption, or global crisis occurs (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), the company is caught flat-footed by competitors who have already evolved their operations. 

Sound familiar? It should, because this occurs in all types of organizations—big multinationals, small and medium-sized enterprises, government agencies, and nonprofits. This is inevitable, since it reflects the long-established business rule that “Organizations Are Organisms.” And if organizations are indeed organisms, then these words should apply to business: “According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; but the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” Our task, therefore, as leaders is to prepare for “survival of the fittest,” not just by being episodically fit via periodic transformation programs, but by being continuously fit via Dynamic Process Transformation.

According to Saldanha, the current approaches of digital and business transformation are episodic, reactive and insufficient, and the current volatile business environment demands a different approach. 

The Inspiration 

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the urgency of getting insights into business operations out faster to the whole world. The authors believed that this topic was too important in the current business environment to be restricted to a few organisations and needed to be commented and discussed broadly, says Saldanha. “That led to the idea of capturing the ideas in a book,” he adds. 

“A few months into writing the book, when we were on Chapter 3 or 4, we realised that a lot of the models and approaches which we had followed intuitively while at Procter & Gamble, actually mimicked best approaches from parallel industries. For instance, our driver of ‘open market model’ for running internal operations—like finance, IT etc., within a company—essentially applies the open market models for macro-economics. Similarly, organising internal business processes (e.g., payroll) as ‘services’ is basically the product management or brand management philosophy applied to internal business processes,” Saldanha explains. That was reassuring and  gave the models in the book more reinforcement, he points out. 

What Next 

Saldanha is looking to create new self-organising ecosystems to further evolve the ideas from Revolutionizing Business Operations. “I will also consider avenues such as podcasts, self-organizing forums, blog platforms for this topic, etc.,” he reveals.