I am more and more profoundly struck by the enormity of the opportunity to radically re-discover, re-shape, re-invent, re-new, re-act, re-approach, and re-create our corporate environments, supply chains, industries, really our business community broadly. Companies and leaders with the courage to actively embrace this revolution will discover and expand their potentiality. However, those that merely observe, resist or ignore it are playing a high risk gamble with their ability to sustain let alone survive the unavoidable changes that have already been set into motion. I have illustrated all of the elements, factors, stakeholders, and drivers at play in How to Prosper From Radical Meaningful Change.
Earlier today I listened to a brilliant HBR IdeaCast featuring Don Tapscott, a provocative thought leader and coauthor of Macrowikinomics, a book I am now inspired to read. In this interview Don provides compelling examples of companies that are embracing this revolution. I agreed with most of Don’s insights, and without question we are at a punctuation point in history. For the purposes of this discussion, I found two topics quite powerful and extremely relevant to further our discussions on the radical change we want ensure we shape in a highly meaningful way.
The first is the need to replace the traditional command and control organizational structures with new ones designed to empower mass collaboration. He shared the example of how Lynx Operating System has been successful by taking a non conventional approach to structural design. This approach mirrors the principles and approach of Agile. The business community broadly has much to learn and leverage from Agile principles and methodologies. While they have been written in context of software development, they apply universally as best practices. In short, it is the customer-centric practice of a highly incremental and adaptive approach with a supporting universal language, notation and processes. Notably, management takes more of a curator approach and gives the developers the autonomy and empowerment to develop solutions that are relevant. This would require a massive shift in leadership, where trust, respect, vulnerability, transparency, and awareness become essential.
The second topic was Don’s suggestion for the news industry to be re-built as a new macro collaborative, eco-system in the form of a “network newspaper”. Capitalizing on the massive opportunity to join forces and play on the same team. I believe that his example is even more powerful when applied to the health care industry. Health care globally, is starving for a new eco-system that both capitalizes and solves the enormous gaps in patient experience and an incredibly bloated cost structure. We need a macro health network and to do this, the abundant number of diverse stakeholders within health care will need to recognize and embrace that we are all on the same side now, the side of the patient.
Our biggest challenge is not the complexity of the solutions required to solve the underlying problems, it is the attachment to traditional solutions and fear of change that are so tightly guarded in some of the highly command and control industries like heath care. Industries like technology, by it’s very nature, have been forced to explore and develop more open, collaborative and adaptive structures and solutions and will be much faster, closer and creative in their strategies to embrace this change.
A great starting place for health care is to re-invent how we approach intellectual property. Patient privacy in particular is not just a barrier for heath care, it has become a convenient excuse not to communicate openly with patients. A great topic for a follow up post.
What are some other issues, not necessarily heath care focused that you think need immediate attention?
Related posts:
18 Comments
Comment by Imtiaz — October 24, 2010 @ 4:13 am
Dear Dawna,
Thanks for the post. You and Don are absolutely right. We need a new ecosystem based on the new business models that has information accessibility and availability at its core. This will change almost everything. The word ” value” will take a new definition as truly pointed out by G.Immelt, Vijaygovindrajang and Chris in their HBR article, “How GE is disrupting itself.” Opportunities in emerging markets will drive the companies to think differently. We will be addressing the right questions facing humanity, i.e., poverty and illiteracy. And, finally this will lead us to sustainable development.
Kindest Regards,
Imtiaz
Comment by dawnamaclean — October 24, 2010 @ 6:25 am
Thanks Imtiaz! An end-to-end responsibility driven business community is attainable and with it comes more sustainable opportunities for certain. We all need to work together to further empower the momentum in the shift from corruption to responsibility and values, hopefully these types of discussions fuel that momentum and inspire more action.
Comment by dawnamaclean — October 24, 2010 @ 10:39 am
Another great podcast with Don posted today, great stuff! http://www.twistimage.com/podcast/archives/spos-225—the-world-of-macrowikinomics-with-don-tapscott/
Comment by Ray Brown — October 24, 2010 @ 10:29 pm
Hi Dawna Thanks for reporting on what sounded like a great ideacast (there’s another new word to me). I’m becoming very conscious of a linked change that’s happening in our business world. I’ve been aware for some time of the push towards outside-in thinking but I’m now seeing lots more references to bottom-up. Your description of Agile thinking actually embodies this. My take is that there is a new channel that requires to be understood and managed, the B2Me channel. Whereas we have become comfortable over many years in discussing B2B and B2C with a context of revenue generation, we now need to handle the B2Me channel whose context is understanding and insight between the business and both their customers and their employees.
Comment by Imtiaz — October 25, 2010 @ 1:52 am
Dear Dawna,
Thanks for sharing the podcast link.
Imtiaz
Comment by dawnamaclean — October 25, 2010 @ 4:56 am
Thanks for joining the discussion Ray. While I agree that “B2Me” as a channel has a much greater significance in the business community broadly, I don’t think it is the vehicle that will address this paradigm shift. The even more relevant change at hand is the multi-dimensional approach needed to support end-to-end responsibility. This requires us to re-architect structures at the organizational level, supply chain and even industry level. And even more significant is how all of these dimensions and channels collaborate and engage to start working on the same side, providing meaningful solutions and also addressing global issues that no one corporation or government can solve on it’s own. My pause in a term like “B2Me” is that we need to move away from a “what’s in it for me” mentality, that said, I love the context behind what you are saying, perhaps a term like “B2X” would sit better with me, where “X” represents customer eXperience and employee eXperience? Looking forward to hearing back from you on this Ray.
Comment by William Powell — October 25, 2010 @ 8:59 am
Love this whole conversation Dawna! Collaboration truly leverages our collective ability so much more than individual effort. Nature has been doing this for years (ants, bees, etc.). I recently blogged about collaborative leadership as well. I was inspired by a great Ted Talk.
It’s great to see collaboration take center stage among the leadership crowd. Feel free to have a read of my post. It complements this post quite well. Thanks for such great insight Dawna!
http://www.williampowellcoaching.com/blog/?p=134
Comment by Ray Brown — October 26, 2010 @ 2:13 pm
Hi Dawna I think you’re right, I don’t think B2Me is the panacea either. However I do think it’s part of the story. Employees and customers want to be treated much more as individuals at some level. We’ve got good at dealing with markets, “staff,” customer bases etc now it’s time to rethink structures, processes and relationships to respond to the better connected, more vocal consumer & employee. Charlene Li spoke about “Open Leadership” in her recent book and you and I both enjoyed reading “getting Naked” on the same theme. So I agree we need a range of new tools, changes and thinking but part of that has to be an opening up to insight and understanding available inside and outside our businesses.
Comment by dawnamaclean — October 26, 2010 @ 6:32 pm
Thanks for joining the conversation William! I read your post and loved it. In particular the beauty of harnessing strengths and building momentum through cyclical collaboration.
Comment by dawnamaclean — October 26, 2010 @ 6:38 pm
Thanks for following back up Ray! Charlene Li’s book “Open Leadership” has been on my read list for a while, looking forward to reading it even more now.
Comment by Ron Dimon — November 16, 2010 @ 7:13 am
Gary Hamel and Henry Chesbrough did a webcast on open service innovation the other day that’s in the same vein:
http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/gary-hamel/upcoming-webinar-open-services-innovation-preview-qa
And they give examples of how NOT hoarding innovation in this area can lead to better adoption and growth.
Comment by dawnamaclean — November 16, 2010 @ 8:10 am
Ron, thanks for sharing the Open Services Innovations discussion.
Henry Chesbrough says “So the first and most fundamental part about being open, seems to be leveraging the tremendous distributed pool of knowledge that exists outside your organization and that no matter how good you are, no matter how big you are, there are too many good ideas and good people outside your organization to try to do it all yourself. Instead, build your innovation process with the founding principle that to be successful in a sustainable way, you’re going to have to connect to and leverage and make use of external ideas in your business.” I love this! Nicely said.
I am also in full alignment when he says “I’m on the side that says we actually need to make some profit somewhere in the process, though others don’t share that belief.” Being open and profitably are not mutually exclusive.
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