"Performance that matters": how to achieve it with the economic leverage of new customer & eco excellence?
Prolog: ecosystems, platforms and the "Great Transformation"
Ecosystems and platforms have become very popular recently.?Therefore, there is a high chance of misunderstanding each other when using the same words with different associations. To avoid this, we would like to explain our understanding:?
Having said this, we can now shed some light on the actual topic of this article:? "Performance that matters".
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1. Global Peter Drucker Forum on "Performance that matters"
We live in interesting times (Chinese curse). #Climate, #Covid, #Ukraine, ... the dominant buzzwords of our time have forced us to rethink our priorities. What does this mean for "performance that matters" - now? Fortunately, the Drucker community will meet in Vienna in November to address this question with the top thinkers of "New Management".
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2. Rethinking performance & excellence for "interesting times"
Performance can no longer focus only on shareholder value or profit, as we used to call it. Milton Friedman's paradigm - "the business of business is business" - is no longer valid in our world of multiple urgencies. But the business of business can't be less business, either.
Degrowth or Great Reset strategies will destroy the innovative power of an entrepreneurial society (and democracy too)
We don't simply need less business, we need better business to survive through the innovative power of an entrepreneurial society.?But a "better" purpose alone ("We're helping the world survive!") will not help us survive, especially when it is often just green washing.
Even if we follow Drucker's purpose of a business, "to create a customer", we have to rethink "customer". We need a new balanced performance and multi-dimensional excellence for sustainable value creation that creates multiple "customer" relationships to match the needs and capacities in an ecosystem.?In this context, excellence does not mean perfection, but beyond the Hellenistic, idealistic thinking, an evolutionary process of improvement.
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3. Christensen & Hagel for customer & ecosystem excellence
Two top thinkers will be with us in Vienna without attending in person. Clayton Christensen passed away last year. With "Competing against luck" he and his team (e.g. Efosa Ojomo!) gave us the "job to be done" theory, for the author the best approach to customer thinking.
John Hagel will not be part of the Drucker community in Vienna either. With his work on dynamic ecosystems, he is part of a movement that is fundamentally rethinking our economic logic beyond the "Adam Smith" paradigm of division of labor.
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Thinking both approaches together helps us not only to achieve customer AND ecosystem excellence, but also to identify continously latent performance opportunies in both dimensions for a sustainable performance.
So we simply need to integrate the two approaches of Clayton Christensen and John Hagel.
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4. Seven questions and answers for new excellence
To do this, we use a third methodology. Design thinking is a very well-known approach to customer-centric innovation. Adding the ecosystem perspectives you do not only clarify the WHY and the WHAT, but also the new HOW in a new world of big changes and new paradigms of economy. More precisely, three questions are not enough, you need 4 more questions (FOR WHOM, WITH WHOM, WHERE, WHEN) and answers (PERSONA, PARTNER, PLATFORM, PROTOTYPE) to integrate customer and ecosystem thinking:
WHY / purpose - not only to make Simon Sinek happy, but also to have a good starting point, FOR WHOM / persona and WITH WHOM / partner - to identify the needs and competencies of all stakeholders, WHAT / value proposition and HOW / practices - to align and integrate the needs and competencies of all stakeholders, WHERE / platforms, and WHEN / prototyping - to realize sustainable and evolving business models. Design thinking offers for each of these W questions and P answers several tools (maps / canvases) to support the creative processes to develop a new value creation for better performance.
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5. Six options for better performance
So beyond the old Adam Smith logic of value creation and economy we find in the "new logic" six options for better performance in three dimensions e.g.
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Epilog: Rethinking and rebuilding companies and economies
Far beyond a local optimization of value co-creation only, customer and ecosystem thinking, based on the work of Christensen and Hagel will help us in the long run to rethink and rebuild companies and economies to produce a new performance that matters at scale.
In the long run, this new post-Adam Smith paradigm will lead to a more sustainable and a much more customer-centric ecosystem economy at scale!?
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Speaker, Author, Professor, Thought Partner on Human Capability (talent, leadership, organization, HR)
2 年Winfried Felser Thanks for sharing this article. It is consistent with the work that Arthur Yeung and I did when we explored a new organization/organizing logic between multi divisional firms and holding companies. Our work summarizes a number of approaches to organization and 8 marvelous case studies to derive the market oriented ecosystem (MOE) logic. We then review six principles for managing this new organizational form. We are so delighted that thoughtful colleagues are exploring and expanding on this work.
Gemeinsam Erfolge durch ?kosysteme schaffen.
2 年Ralf F. Korb!
Gemeinsam Erfolge durch ?kosysteme schaffen.
2 年Marc Wagner!
Gemeinsam Erfolge durch ?kosysteme schaffen.
2 年Dave Ulrich In an article about a "Customer / Market Oriented Ecosystem Economy" I have to integrate your work, Dave, too! After I met Clayton Christensen, Efosa Ojomo and John Hagel in 2017 in Vienna it was your vision in 2018 which made clear that not only market / customer and ecosystems perspectives must be integrated, but that MOE will be the future of the organization and economy.