Beyond business transformation. Leaders guide on how value share, focus and elimination drive acceleration

Businesses are constantly transforming. The areas like business models, workflow, human capital, cost, structures, technology and operations are always evolving and they will keep on evolving as we get used to the digital age.

To be truly successful what businesses need is acceleration. 

In leaders day to day drive to transform, acceleration some time gets neglected. What acceleration takes is deep thinking and the results are truly rewarding if the thinking about taking businesses to the next level is done from an acceleration mind set. So lets unpack and take a moment towards understanding what is acceleration;

• In physics - acceleration is the name we give to any process where the velocity changes. Since velocity is a speed and a direction, there are only two ways for you to accelerate: change your speed or change your direction—or change both
• In sports - acceleration is built around increasing your speed, strength, power and agility,

As leaders are transforming their businesses, they need to do this with a certain drive in a chosen direction with a desired speed.

So, from a senior leadership view, what are the things you need be aware of towards this acceleration journey in your business ?

Step 1: Start from understanding. This understanding needs to be at a much more honest and deeper level on the fundamental concept of how in the future our business will creates. Now creating value is not simply about market share or growth rate or revenue - it actually a much wider concept.

The shift here needs to be around the thinking of value share as value share is a much more broader concept in customer journey.

The future understanding of value share and what truly drivers the evolving customers value needs which needs to be understood and re understood as the businesses and customers are transforming constantly.

Step 2 : There needs to be a clear focus eliminating the silent killers which erode profit and resources. This is about eliminating the complexity in both front end, back end operations but also in the so called "value add" operations. The front and back end operations are usually easy to target Here automation or elimination can assist.

But for the '"value add" options that are seen as valuable from customers perspective are often ignored. The careful evaluation here needs to around the complexity associated with these "value adds" and if these "value adds" are radically impacting profits and eroding the economic profits from shareholders perspectives there these need to be eliminated.

Eliminate where possible (even value adds) as neither time, management, capital or labour is free.

Step 3: In order to accelerate, focusing on what matters most really matters. The good old Pareto principal, the 80:20 rule comes to rescue here. However when you look at typical corporates deeply - its more like 15% of the overall focused activities that generate the vast amount to shareholder value.

So the focus needs to be razor sharp on what we as a business are good and what we as a business are not good at. Here we can look at this from the two dimensional approach. The first dimension is around "What is really driving the value for the company (truly strategic)", " What is non core" and "What is of functional value" and other dimension is around taking a deep view around our own level of internal competence i.e things we have "zero competency", "moderate" or "high competency".

Focusing on what matters most really matters.

Here the focus needs to be on the areas of high strategic value where we have (and continue to have) high competency because this is where the results will come from. For instance on one hand, sales and marketing or engineering and design might in the future be of high value to a business where it has high expertise but on other, areas like as accounts payable or logistics could be of functional value and if we have moderate expertise then this should be automated or outsourced so that focus can be on acceleration.

Focus on high competency and high strategic value areas.

In summary, high potential human capital is scarce and businesses have limited access to it. It's the access to human capital that truly drivers business success if focused and deployed appropriately.

It's all about refocusing and redeploying human capital across appropriately across transformation and acceleration efforts to truly drive the value for shareholders and stakeholders.

Leaders need to clearly evaluate their understanding how value is created, eliminate the silent killers that drain profit and resources and having a clear focus on high competency and high value areas.