All Posts Tagged With: "capabilities"
Developing Critical Capabilities
What are the most important capabilities for managing corporate performance?
In September, McKinsey asked that question in an online global survey of 763 executives. The top four capabilities named were:
- Leadership: The ability to ensure that leaders shape and inspire the actions of others to drive better performance.
- Direction: The capacity to articulate where the company is heading and how to get there, and to align people appropriately.
- External Orientation: The capacity to engage in constant two-way interactions with customers, suppliers, and/or other partners.
- Innovation: The ability to generate a flow of ideas so the company is able to adapt.
These were the top four capabilities for the current economic crisis and the top four after the crisis. They also happen to be capabilities evaluated by the Baldrige Criteria.
The leadership category of the Criteria asks how senior leaders set and deploy their company’s vision and values and how their personal actions reflect a commitment to those values.
The strategic planning category asks how you deploy action plans throughout the company to achieve your strategic objectives, which define where your company is heading, and the workforce focus category asks how your performance management system helps you achieve the action plans.
The customer focus category asks how build relationships with your…
20Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBeing Good at the Right Things
The questions in the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria ask you to describe your organization’s characteristics and competitive environment. This includes the key requirements of three groups: employees, customers, and your supply chain. It also asks about key strategic challenges and advantages that relate to creating a sustainable organization.
The strategic planning category picks up this thread by asking how you determine your core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages. It also asks how your strategy development process identifies potential blind spots and your ability to execute the plan.
Some organizations use simple priority quadrant diagrams to help identify blind spots and assess capabilities. Here’s an example that matches organizational capabilities to customer requirements.
The diagram may be simple but the data, information, and analysis behind it is not. First, you need a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what they require. You can read articles about this here and here. If you assume you know what these requirements are, the decisions you base on your assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction.
Second, you need a profound knowledge of what your organization’s capabilities are. Again, if you assume you know what they are without doing a reality check, your assumptions…
18Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIdentifying Capabilities Your Organization Needs
According to the Baldrige Criteria, strategy development involves collecting and analyzing data and information about internal capabilities, external factors, and long-term sustainability. If you only consider existing internal capabilities, you may miss major shifts in customer wants and needs that could be opportunities to grow.
A recent blog by Scott Anthony on HarvardBusiness.org identified a key area to consider as part of any strategic planning assessment. In “Constant Transformation Is the New Normal,” Anthony notes that “transformation requires a relentless outside-in focus” to identify opportunities for growth. “Then companies need to determine which of their capabilities they can borrow to seize that opportunity,” he writes, “which new capabilities they need to create, and which capabilities exist on the open market.”
Anthony quotes Jeff Bezos of Amazon who said, “If you want to really continually revitalize the service you provide the customer you can’t stop at what you’re good at. You have to ask what do our customers need and want. And no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.”
Building the capabilities you need to better serve your customers is the focus of another Criteria question: “How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies,…
28Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
