Blueprint for Business Survival-Part Two | WPN World People News

Why create an operating blueprint? It provides two strategic enablers:
• 360˚ Enterprise Models (business, process, organization, technology, etc.), provide the ability to visualize the end-to-end business goals and execution strategies before beginning costly and often irreversible strategy implementations. These models create the opportunity to ask “what-if” questions and test scenarios that help vet problems and issues early on.
• Impact Analyses and Scenarios, with which to alter factors, create multiple output scenarios, evaluate the end-to-end impact of each scenario, and arrive at the optimal solution.

An operating blueprint allows owners and management to work together based on converged intelligence of market opportunities, execution capabilities, and business model differentiations.

No contractor would build a house without blueprints, and an enterprise operational structure and processes are no different. Methods of “guesstimation” must be replaced with precise metrics that provide verifiable outcomes.

Properly implemented, operating blueprints allow enterprises to:

• Maximize ROI at an earlier stage in the funding lifecycle of each initiative, and collectively across the entire organization
• Increase transparency between strategy, funding model, and execution model
• Prioritize and guide improved performance, value, and sustainable growth.

Success of an enterprise during times of market volatility is often driven by its ability to recognize significant challenges and immediately identify the strategic imperatives necessary to address them. While nothing new, accomplishing such goals in today’s global climate requires new organizational structures, creating and sharing new kinds of business knowledge, understanding and applying emerging socio-economic models, and developing repeatable, reusable transformational processes enabled by accessible technologies. Operating blueprints provide the basis for a predictive, sustainable business plan for managing these challenges and opportunities for growth and success in the future.

In light of current events, it’s easy to lose perspective on what’s happening at a transformative level, or to understand why. The conventional business models upon which the world economy has been based for the past 100 years or so have generally been perceived as fixed. But is it so? The average lifespan of S&P 500 companies is 25 years, having fallen from 50 years, with a mortality rate of ten or more per year. Why do businesses fail? In some cases it is natural mortality as the product or service is no longer needed, but the secret reason rarely mentioned is the reluctance or inability to adapt to change. Why? What’s so bad about change?

• Change is the key factor in achieving personal and/or organizational goals. Without change there can be no progress.
• Innovation is the vital ingredient in the individual or institution’s ability to make effective and practical use of change. It is the great what if factor in decision-making and the entity’s raison d’etre to move forward and stay abreast of the turbulent and constantly changing times.
• Sustainability is the manifestation of health and growth, but also diversity: indeed, it is made up in large part of change and innovation.

This trinity of objectives for meaningful economic, institutional and social progress represents the most sought-after attributes of individuals and organizations. They rest upon the foundation of converged objectives and an inherent transformation from outdated methods to the new and more productive ways of conducting business.

A long time ago, management guru Peter Drucker said:

“Indeed the modern organization (beginning with the Jesuit Order in 1536) was expressly created to have results on the outside, that is, to make a difference in its society or its economy.”

The implicit — and explicit — expectation is that institutions should “do good” for others: The ultimate objective is to produce a wellspring of new ideas, profound change, dynamic innovation, and sustainable opportunities.

These are times of high risk for most endeavors, whether business or societal. Most problems are global problems, because most things we touch have reverberating effects throughout the economy and the world. As the knowledge economy expands and global interconnections increase, complexity grows exponentially. Proactively managing this high level of complexity requires adaptation, evolution, and a convergence of people, process, technology, and socio-economic boundaries.

Source: Baseline