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Archive for the ‘High Performance Companies’ Category

Using a Repeatable Business Model to Sustain Growth

Posted in Business Success, Harvard Business Review, High Performance Companies, New Concepts, Organizational Change, tagged , , on April 21, 2012 | 2 Comments »

As anyone who has read my blog may have gathered, I love businesses that continually pursue new ideas and believe organizations need to embrace change in order to remain competitive in the long run. A few days ago I got e-mail from Bain Insights on a subtle approach to business change called Repeatability. Bain and Company have set up a website containing articles and research on this topic in support of a new book by two of their partners Chris Zook and James Allen called ‘Repeatability: Building Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change.’

The Idea:

The authors recognize that while 80% of high performing companies have differentiation at the heart of their corporate strategy, such differentiation can become excessively complex. As a company becomes more complex they may lose a sense of who they are and what they are good at, as they continually pursue radical change in order to stay ahead of the competition. Such an approach Zook and Allen’s strategic research suggests may not be sustainable in the long run.

The Concept:

Zook and Allen advocate a simple repeatable business model that can be applied to new products and changing markets. The concept requires an organization to constantly adapt over time building on their differentiation in a way that reinforces their strategic advantages and keeps everyone on the same page. Under this concept all employees should know what the company’s key success factors are and change is constant rather than radical and disruptive. This quote from the authors’ Harvard Business Review article sums up the repeatable business model concept:

‘Really successful companies build their strategies on a few vivid and hardy forms of differentiation that act as a system and reinforce one another. They grow in ways that exploit their core differentiators by replicating them in new contexts. And they turn the sources of differentiation into routines, behaviors and activity systems that everyone in the organization can understand and follow.’

In addition, learning systems are put in place to ensure continuous improvement can occur constantly.

Repeatability in Practice:

Organizations with repeatable business models do three things:

  1. They understand what their customers want.
  2. They translate their strategy into clear business principles that can be easily understand and adopted by employees and leaders from all levels of the hierarchy.
  3. They are wired to connect and respond to feedback, adapting accordingly to keep learning.

Lego is an example of a company with a repeatable business model in place. After years of strategic errors Lego developed clear principles and metrics in order to replicate and improve on past successes, while adapting to new markets and the changing business environment. Using their repeatable business model Lego were able to increase their profit margins by 40% creating additional value for the company, which they hope to sustain.

For more information on the repeatable business model check out Chris Zook and James Allen’s book: Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change.

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5 Ways High Performance Companies Rethink and Reinvent

Posted in Business Success, High Performance Companies, Organizational Change, tagged , , on April 2, 2012 | 4 Comments »

My first blog post illustrated the importance of daring to change in order to avoid organizational inertia. In that first post I highlighted a retailer I had grown up with in the UK: Woolworth’s. Once a household name, Woolworth’s failed to reinvent itself until it was too late. In this blog post I wanted to share 5 ways high performance companies rethink and reinvent their strategies before revenues from their current strategies start to decline.

  1. They invest in new capabilities: High performance organizations start developing new capabilities, before they lose their competitive advantage from their current ones. Apple is a great example of this.
  2. They focus on talent acquisition and retention: In this economy many companies have become complacent and lazy assuming that their employees can’t go anywhere. While this may be true for your mediocre employees, talent always has options and sooner or later may be gone. High performance companies continually focus on retaining and developing surplus talent that can help drive the business forward in the long-term.
  3. They continually scan the market: High performers don’t rest on their laurels, continually scanning the environment for new ideas in order to identify untapped consumer needs and improve their economic outlook.  Like Jim Harbaugh of the San Francisco 49ers says, (shameless plug for husband’s hometown team), you are either getting better or you are getting worse, you never stay the same.
  4. They Innovate: High performance companies are risk takers who are not afraid of change. Successful managers recognize that the real risk is in not innovating, becoming stagnant and collapsing.  These businesses have an internal environment that fosters creative thinking, and executives in these companies recognize that new progressive ideas can come from anywhere in the organization not just the C-suite.  As a result employees are empowered by knowing that they have a role to play in shaping the company’s future success.
  5. They are agile: Today’s high performing businesses have agile organizational structures in order to be able to adapt fast to the increasingly unpredictable ever-changing business environment and take advantage of sudden market opportunities.

What do you think? Feel free to add to my list of characteristics of high performance companies in the comments section below. 

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