Mobilizing Minds

The central theme of your corporate strategy should be to redesign your organization so you can better mobilize the mind power of the people who already work for your organization. Dissolve all the barriers which have traditionally stopped this from happening and you will unleash some vast sources of new wealth.

The most successful organizations of the 21st century will be better managed than their 20th century predecessors. They will remove complexity from their management structures by better distributing decision making authority. They will also combine best practices seamlessly to create a partnership at the top rather than a dictatorship. They will also be managed dynamically so they can seize upon emerging opportunities rather than statically or rigidly.

To design an organization that can better capture the commercial opportunities of the 21st century you need to:

Manage Better

1. Build better business “backbones”

If you genuinely want enterprise-wide collaboration to occur, you first need to reduce unwanted complexity at the front lines of your business. At the present time, many organizations have an ambiguous management structure which lacks clear-cut directions about who is ultimately responsible for a decision to get made. If the management structure is too complex, it also becomes a hindrance to the organization taking action when new or novel commercial opportunities arise.

2. Develop a partnership at the top

A business backbone management structure works well only when a firm is operating as a single entity. If there is a “silo mentality” where managers are competing with each other for resources, the business backbone concept simply won’t work.

As with most things, the key to making a partnership at the top work lies in the details. You need to develop a blueprint which details who does what and the rules by which everyone will be expected to abide. All participants need to buy in if this is to work.

Having a single governance committee for the entire firm automatically dilutes turf wars. It doesn’t, however, generally mean there will be less turnover in top management. This is not a bad thing because new talent often injects some fresh thinking. A single governance committee does provide a means by which management protocols can be standardized across the firm. This is helpful in enabling the enterprise to be able to fully capture the many and varied benefits of the digital age where often multiple alternatives are technically feasible. A single committee also helps instil the firm’s values.

3. Employ dynamic management

Traditionally, most firms have had the approach that business structure follows strategy – you decide on your strategy and then you build an organization to implement that strategy. In the volatile and constantly changing marketplace of the 21st century, companies need to be more flexible so they can harness the new wealth creating strategies which will be arising all the time. In this type of environment, a new and more dynamic style of management is required.

In practical terms, dynamic management means to pursue a portfolio of business initiatives, any of which may ultimately turn out to be the revenue engines of the future. Making strategic decisions on the basis of the rise or fall of a portfolio of initiatives is the defining characteristic of dynamic management. A good management team should have something around 10 to 15 projects on the boil at any one time. They then make ongoing decisions about which new projects to add, which projects to cultivate and grow, which to scale up and which to terminate.

In the marketplace of the 21st century, companies will need to harness all their intangibles and more if they are to excel. As the digital age becomes further and more entrenched, it will become increasingly important to encourage the mobilization of the mind power of workforces. The best way to facilitate this is to establish formal networks, to grow internal talent marketplaces from which talent can be drawn as required and to establish a knowledge marketplace where knowledge creators and knowledge seekers can find each other. The emphasis here is to remove the complexities which impede conventional organizations.

Improve flows

1. Grow your formal networks

Pure and simple, formal networks within an organization bring natural professional communities together. They enable the sharing of knowledge and other proprietary information to happen so people don’t waste time reinventing the wheel over and over. Formal networks are good because they help leaders harness the mind power of their people.

It isn’t at all unusual for informal networks to flourish within an organization but formal networks are an entirely different kind of entity. Informal networks evolve at their own pace whereas formal networks are capable of being managed because they are sponsored and encouraged by the organization.

2. Establish a talent marketplace

It may seem obvious that if a company is going to get serious about harnessing the mind power of its workforce, then it should start by creating a talent pool, or marketplace, to match available talent and opportunities. Despite that, very few companies do this well. Most still assign talent within the traditional silos rather than making a concerted effort to find the best available talent across the entire organization.

The talent marketplace concept can be embellished by the use of HR personnel who effectively act as market makers who facilitate the efficient operation of the marketplace.

3. Pool knowledge in a central place

There are substantial and obvious competitive advantages which can come from sharing proprietary information, insights into customers and cutting edge research across an entire enterprise. This can, however, be quite a challenge when people are spread across a variety of locations, areas of specialization and countries. The key to being able to do this is to have all the knowledge organized into a pool which is then centralized and made available to all.

If you’re attempting to develop a thriving knowledge pool in your own enterprise, there is one additional element you should also try. Instead of treating the knowledge pool as an asset everyone owns, make it possible for the pool to act as a free marketplace which creates value. In other words, provide an exchange mechanism where knowledge seekers actually pay knowledge providers for what they know. If you can provide a suitable exchange mechanism like that and a way for knowledge to be priced, you won’t have to motivate people to get involved. They will get into action on their own steam.

Motivate behaviours

1. Provide meaningful incentives

Almost everyone agrees the current generation of performance metrics don’t adequately measure what genuinely creates wealth. Accordingly, a 21st century organization will need a broader set of performance metrics.

With talent being the limiting factor in this era, the most logical financial metrics would be:

• Profit per employee – net income divided by the number of people directly involved in generating that income. Tracking profit per employee keeps you focused on using their talents and knowledge and not just their labour.


• Number of employees – which serves as a rough proxy for how well a firm is handling the inherent complexities of business. The total employees figure also indicates whether the firm is growing or not.


• Returns on capital – and whether or not they exceed the costs of obtaining that capital.

Once these financial measures become better known, it then becomes feasible to integrate these metrics into the way targets are set and returns are evaluated and ultimately rewarded internally. If financial incentives are then paid on the basis of meeting those targets which are set, managers become far more self directed. It’s up to each of them to figure out ways to meet their targets rather than following corporate instructions. This also allows managers to be paid on activities they can influence rather than those they cannot.

2. Develop role-specific metrics

Since the most successful firms of the 21st century will involve loads of internal collaboration, it’s important to ensure there is a consistent system of performance evaluation being used. What constitutes an “exceptional” performance in one department or on one project shouldn’t attract an altogether different rating if the work was carried out in another department or on another project. There needs to be a consistent performance evaluation system in place.

Effective performance metrics will be tailored to the specific roles people are expected to play. Since both individual performance and collaboration are essential activities, a robust evaluation system for 21st century corporations will have two separate performance ratings:

An individual performance measurement – which tracks the actual financial results generated by that person and compares that to the performance of a role model.

A mutual performance measurement – which tracks how well the person has contributed to the success of others and to the success of the firm as a whole.

By putting in place a process which genuinely differentiates between superior, good, average and poor performances, you then have a solid foundation on which your incentive program can be based.

Organize more effectively

1. Use design as a strategy

To build an organization which navigates successfully the complexities of business in the 21st century you need a Master Plan, which will describe how your organization should operate at a specific point in the future, and a Game Plan, which will outline how you plan on getting from where you are at present to where you want to be in the future.

Naturally it goes without saying both the game plan and the master plan need to be owned by leadership if they are to have any chance of succeeding. More than likely, a program office will need to be established to oversee implementation. This office will launch a number of major initiatives which will allow the company to change as planned.

Most businesses are too big to redesign all at once, so a staged approach to implementing a game plan will likely be required.

2. Build a 21st century organization

The major challenge facing 20th century firms was to mobilize labour and capital as productively as possible. Their structures reflected that goal. In the 21st century, however, much of the work that needs to get done is quite different. It utilizes brain power and intangibles to create value. Today, organizations need to harness the mind power or the intangible output of employees who think far more intensively. This is why organizational design is so valuable. If organizations can better harness the capacity of their employees to think, impressive things can happen.

Most companies in business today tap into only a small fraction of the added value which could be created if they were better organized. There is a huge opportunity for firms to create new revenue streams based on the value of their intellectual assets. Equally, there is also considerable scope for talented individuals to earn more money as well.

If a company with 10,000 employees can find ways to generate an additional $50,000 per employee by charging “rents” for others to utilize its intellectual property assets, that would add $500 million in annual profits and probably about another $5 billion to the firm’s market capitalization. It’s not unreasonable for larger enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees to have the potential to add billions in annual revenue and tens of billions in additional market capitalization in this same way.

The real key to being able to actually generate these revenues is for a business to become less complex. Complexity is the enemy which tends to limit the performance of most companies. If unproductive complexity can be eliminated, more emphasis can be placed on finding ways to increase the productivity of the firm’s intangible assets. If ways can be found to increase the number of productive interactions between employees while keeping the number of non-productive interactions to a minimum, then great things can happen.

Lowell Bryan is a published author and has more than 30 years experience writing and speaking about strategy, organization and financial services.

Claudia Joyce is a colleague of Lowell Bryan and serves as a core member of the Financial Services and Strategy Practices.

Schooley Mitchell Telecom Consultants are recognized as one of North Americas leading authorities in Telecommunications. Our consultants are dedicated to helping businesses save money, add security and improve efficiencies.