How to change the organisation of your business and make it more competitive

The Japanese economist Masaaki Imai reminded us in an interview of the 5 rules of his own Kazen method which combines change (Kai) and better (Zen): 

Regardless of whether the Nippon methodology is considered efficient or not, Imai’s advice about the importance of changing the business organisation to make it more competitive is to be taken seriously. But where to start? 

The paradigm of cooperation, communication and sharing

An investigation of the Bocconi SDA on 200 managers has highlighted what would be needed to achieve this goal. Half of the sample agreed in identifying the paradigm of cooperation, communication and sharing as a possible answer. In essence, according to the interviewers, the people in the company should:

The research of the Bocconi speaks of “proactivity” as a necessary condition for the success of the company, that is the ability to sense in advance the problems, the trends, or the changes so to plan in time the appropriate actions. In different terms, to be competitive it is necessary to be especially fast.  

Once identified the problem, it remains to be understood how to solve it. Even the School of Business Management of Milan underlines the difficulty in finding the adequate organisational models. Maybe because the existing models are applied in a schematic way on different types of companies. Or they propose a rigid system with the aim of making the organisation more flexible which is a contradiction. 

 The digital hive and the management of contexts: not a model but a method  

The first thing to keep in mind for your company is that the availability of new technologies allows you to have solutions that are simple and economically viable to manage the change. The flexibility of the IT applications that may be integrated with the ones already present in the company (CRM, ERPS, Database, etc) must be at the service of the ductility of the model to use for promoting the shift of the organisational structure. In this sense rather than a model, your company needs a method. 

Such as, for example, the Context Oriented Management used in the digital hive of SweetHive. SweetHive with the Management of Contexts does not start from axiomatic assumptions but from the field recognition of business processes and inherent activities. Actually, the classic approach by area often creates some information silos which prevent dialogue and exchange. 

The person in charge of the sales department, for example, knows very little or nothing about the situation of the warehouse, at the head of logistics. And this is true for the management as well as for the personnel employed in the single areas. 

Working by contexts, on the other hand, allows the sharing of the necessary information with the aid of digital tools that facilitate the exchange of data in a smart way. You do not subvert the hierarchical nature of the company and its traditional subdivision in departments but it so that they can talk to each other.  

Changing: simple but not easy 

Changing the organisation of your company hence “can be simple but not necessarily easy” as the American writer Jon Kabat-Zinn would say. Simple because the management by contexts is not invasive but progressive, and it is also fast and makes use of IT applications that fit “naturally” in the business infrastructure.  

It is not necessarily easy because it requires the will to change and, starting from the leadership, to invest in all the components of your company.