Organizing for Growth
Is your organization regularly bogged down by silos and lack of coordination?
Are there conflicting objectives and goals within different departments which lead to a sub-optimal market performance?
Do your customers and partners often complain about the dysfunction in your organization?
The demand side of the organization remains in process flow mode. Much effort has been placed behind reproducing the success of the supply-side efficiency model (process, technology and metrics) on the demand side. As a result, the consumer/customer is placed at the beginning of the process. Research teams conduct surveys to gather knowledge which can be turned into insights. These insights are handed over to product development for further processing into innovative features that meet consumer/customer needs. Then the communications teams develop messages to tell consumers about the product and how it fits their need. The process is linear.
The organizational structure associated with the process is vertical and hierarchical. There is a research organization, reporting to the head of research and measured by the productivity of research (number of projects, cost per project and so on). There is a product development team reporting to a head of development and measured by products launched or improved. There is a communications team that develops messages, reporting to a head of marketing or of marketing communications, measured by message effectiveness. Often there is a brand management team or product management team in a co-coordinating role, but they are also organized hierarchically. Organizational designers create something called “horizontal mechanisms” (such as “cross-functional teams”) to integrate the activities of the hierarchical groups. These are band-aids and can be equally as rigid as the vertical structures.
To organize in a way that both reflects and operates the new demand generation model requires a shift as radical as the one the consumer is going through. It requires a change from a hierarchical and functional model to a network model.
What exactly does that entail? EMM Group’s organizing for growth offering focused on five changes that must be made in traditional organizational design.
- Replace traditional organization structure with a network.
- Replace jobs with roles.
- Replace job descriptions with deliverables.
- Replace linear processes with collaborative technologies
- Replace hierarchy with collaboration.
The most important organic growth network in the enterprise is Demand Generation. Without demand there is no growth. Without increasing demand, there is no continuous improvement. With Demand Generation we see the continuous, seamless linkage among the consumer, Marketing, Customer Management, R&D and Product Development. Feedback from the consumer and the market provides the R&D team with the data it needs to create and develop new products. Similarly, feedback about the logistical needs of the customer is information that Operations uses to improve service. These activities – the exchange of information to improve deliverables – create growth.
To design a modern Demand Generation network, we start by defining the key roles, then ensuring they have the right knowledge to share among the roles, the right processes for sharing and the right enabling technology.