Buddhism vs Catholicism

#Scaling up #Excellence

Chapter 2 take-home | #buddhism vs #Catholicism

Reflection: Scaling excellence is? not all about organizations that want to scale their products or processes. Individuals can also replicate what has worked in the past for them. What have you seen work? What makes you happy, productive, healthy? Can you do more of that??

Catholicism – aims to replicate or clone preordained/pre-tested practices, designs, beliefs, processes in new people and new places.?

Buddhism – There’s established principles, beliefs and mindsets that guide people on why they do certain things. The do’s and don’ts. No specifics, just principles. So the specifics of what people do can vary from person to person and from place to place depending on their unique contexts.?

The key challenge with leaders is managing the tension (rigidity vs flex) between the tested-and-true practices while still leaving room to try out new things and reinventing - a balance between replicating the learning and the known in the organization while still adapting to new market realities.

Reflection: Sometimes, the business can define a perfect mix of both Buddhism and Catholicism by deciding which parts of their business would be okay adapting either of these scaling mindsets. Think of, for example, McDonalds or KFC. In terms of Kitchen processes, they can adopt what Intel popularized as ‘Copy Exactly’ Philosophy. But in other parts of the business like hiring, procurement, they can adapt to local scenarios especially if there’s legal limitations or there exists a strong business case for that. In many cases, you find that cloning cannot be done everywhere and in everything. There’s also cultural contexts which are usually a strong force to manage.?

Organizations can be more Buddhist or Catholic leaning but at the end of the day, the best leaders and teams often strike the right balance between replication and customization. On scaling excellence, there has to be core parts of the business that must replicate. The more a business can find many parts that can replicate, the easier (and cheaper) it is to scale. There has to be a lot of standardization in scaling excellence. One of the most important scale elements an organization can scale is its culture and experience.?

Buddhism or Catholicism?

This is a present and a vexing tension and there’s no magic formula. Each organization has their own leaning. The decision point is whether and when to move towards one end in given locations and circumstances and making trade-offs where necessary. It’s also about having an eye on the business and deciding when there’s excessive ‘standardization’ or ‘customization’ and what effects this has on the organization, overall.?

The key case for standardization is to enable the spreading of learnings and excellence within the organization which eventually cuts cost (including R&D) and reduce the risk of ‘delusions of uniqueness’ where people and locations get trapped in the thinking that they’re unique and wander about trying things that have already been tested to be true.?

Important: Do not fuse random ‘best practices’ especially when testing something new. Use an existing template that has been used elsewhere - something you can touch and feel. Edit parts that do not exactly suit your market/context. Reading case studies of mega failures in China for such superior brands like Home Depot, Costco etc, helps to be extremely open and fast to adapt to new markets and cultural realities in the local marketplace. This applies for big businesses setting up in mature markets as would with small social enterprises setting up in rural marketplaces in Sub-saharan Africa. The mindset is the same. The idea is to start with tried and tested, proven replicable templates and adjust for parts that don't work in your context – and this can easily and flexibly be done when doing prototyping.?

Encouraging Buddhism promotes accountability, commitment and local ownership. The local teams feel that they have control over success or failure of what happens in their local marketplace.?

Leaning towards Buddhism is helpful when you already have the right mindset and principles in the organization that guides people’s behavior and ways of work but lack a replicable template or such template cannot play in extremely diverse contexts. This also applies when you do not have a solid model and have to experiment to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Buddhism also opens up opportunities for new people and new places to try out new things. Some of the breakthrough processes and product ideas have been born out of this willingness to embrace customization.?

Alone vs Together – again no perfect formula. Organizations keen on massive scale have embraced partners. It’s hard to maintain standardization as you may wish with other partners because they also come with their own ways of doing things. Other organizations have shunned partners for the simple reason of remaining in control. In fact, some organizations prefer to remain small to keep its foundational values intact – something that becomes harder as you embrace new markets and new partners.?

More vs Better — to spread your footprint further and faster, sometimes it’s worth sacrificing short-term excellence. Research shows that excellence (and better ways of doing things) is lost every time you enter into a new location and takes some time before the new location performance rises to be at par with older locations. The learning doesn’t happen quickly with new locations, customers and employees. It takes time to weave through this ‘learning curve’.?

In some cases, a bad imitation of a good solution is better than nothing — at least you’ve got something in your hands to improve on. Sometimes snowballs are better than no balls.

Reflection: for the organizations that have elements that are standardized, the rule should be, everything that is standard shall remain standardized until a case is made to vary and this is agreed and documented.?

The ‘Guardrail strategy’ — when managing between Catholicism and Buddhism, the Guardrail strategy sets clear constraints on the few non-negotiables that MUST be upheld and leave the teams with enough runway to maneuver and steer the processes around these constraints as they see fit. The Guardrail strategy also offers a middle ground to achieve both standardization and customizations and also as a way of creating motivation and scaling effort.?