Creating a Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE)

This is my third post on Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich’s new book, Reinventing the Organization.

My insights in my last two MOE related posts do create a few issues with Arthur and Dave’s suggested framework or process for designing a Market Oriented Organisation (MOE) which is shown above. (But please note that my posts always criticise rather than endorse, particularly as I use my blog to develop my own thinking, and therefore tend to focus on things I disagree with, or don’t understand, in order to work out what I do believe for myself. So like most of my reviews, this one will read more negatively than it should. Reinventing the Organization a great book, and if you’re interested in new opportunities in organisations reinvention, you should definitely read it.)

I think the first issue arises from studying three digital companies in Silicon Valley and four near equivalents in China (as well as Supercell). There’s a definite opportunity to use network effects to gain a monopolistic advantage in digital technology and the use of digital platforms lie at the heart of these easily scalable exponential organisations. But is that what we really want to recommend? Becoming a monopoly is a sensible commercial objective but it’s not going to provide a wonderful result for the global economy or society as a whole.

A second issue results from extrapolating the above examples to various other sectors and geographies. The extended, non-digital model will still work best for companies with lots of similar operations, eg retail stores like Walgreens. Platforms work best for relatively simple work which can be divided into tasks rather than more complex work which needs to pull people together into organisations. IT is a great example of this of course, which is why digital platforms work best of all.

Network effects also doesn’t work in the quite the same way outside technology. Competitive advantage is not going to automatically follow a MOE strategy, especially if a company’s competitors are also developing as MOEs. Where network effects don’t apply, more boringly traditional competitive advantage comes from choice and differentiation.

Plus there’s not that much room for that many ecosystems to exist. And even if ecosystems become the prevailing economic model, most companies are going to be ecosystem participants rather than orchestrators. There’s going to be a lot of wasted effort if every company now starts to develop their own ecosystem from scratch.

And there is still lots of valid choice:

• Eg, I still think internal ecosystems can provide a lot of the benefits of their multi-organisation counterparts.
• Or there are other options for developing more decentralised ecosystems that don’t depend on a platform, or where the orchestrator’s platform is a basis for a distributed ecosystem, but where the orchestrator doesn’t play a role in the ecosystem itself .
• Or perhaps for becoming a blockchain based digital autonomous organisation (DAO) which if some predictions become true could blow the platform based organisation apart.
• Or in lots of areas, hierarchical functional organisations can still rule!

For all these reasons, I think an evolved organisation design process needs to enable an organisation to choose the form it should take, rather than starting from the premise that it needs to be a MOE. So, for me, the sequence in any OD framework should read as something like:

• Environment - all sectors and geographies are different - what is going on that your organisation needs to respond to, and if possible, inform? (“Create the future by anticipating what the market will be”)
• Strategy and capability - these should both go together still for me. The capabilities need to support the strategy, but ideally needs to inform it too. Eg if you are, or are going to be a MOE, then your existing capabilities will indicate whether you are likely to be most successful as a creative, technology based or efficiency oriented one. This also provides the opportunity for creating value (“Strategy follows people”).
• These then impact the nature of the potential ecosystem, and of the systems and structure of the ecosystem and your particular organisation.

It’s the selection of the right capabilities and principles, linked to the environment and strategy, which provides basis for choice in organisation design as well as the opportunity for more traditional competitive advantage. And information, customer, innovation and agility are clearly going to be useful capabilities but they may not be the right capabilities for your organisation. (Just as Amazon actually focuses on customer obsession, Tencent on user experience and Google on technology based innovation.)

In addition, these are all capabilities required by the ecosystem rather than capabilities required by the organisations participating in an ecosystem. I’d actually suggest the main capability required by any participant, including the orchestrator, is likely to be cooperation and collaboration. These are partly provided and automated by the platform, but they also always needs to be embedded in the people and their relationships, which is why I focus on social capital in The Social Organization (TSO).

Collaboration and other more human centred capabilities also have an important advantage alongside market orientation or other work based capabilities. Innovation doesn’t just originate through better alignment with external opportunities - it also comes from developing the inherent potential of people working for the business. Together with the two-way links between the environment and the strategy, and the strategy and capability, this also helps the MOE to create value.

For example, another type of ecosystem (perhaps not a market oriented one, and perhaps not even one operating a very technologically based platform) might include communities alongside horizontal teams in order to build relationships and insights and support the people involved.


However, even with these changes I still worry slightly that this MOE creation process looks a bit like strategic planning, whereas Arthur and Dave suggests MOEs need to develop strategic agility instead. I agree, although actually, I think strategic planning can still be performed within organisations, as long as it’s done at a high enough level and with a sufficiently inclusive approach. But I don’t think this will work for a whole ecosystem. Developing this has to be an incremental and emergent approach.

This is about making external connections with other organisations which might become partners later even if you can’t see exactly how. And it’s about preparing your own organisation to be more open to working with others, and more cellular and platform based internally too (through the use of horizontal teams, communities and networks, as in TSO). So designing your organisation and designing potential interfaces with other organisations rather than designing the whole ecosystem. I still think this fits with Arthur and Dave’s suggestion to “see the whole, but get started on only part of the transformation” too. And it works for any organisation, regardless of whether you want to, or are able to become the ecosystem orchestrator or not.


My previous posts:

• http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2019/09/dave-ulrich-reinventing-organization-MOE.html
• http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2019/09/ulrich-market-oriented-ecosystem-MOE.html

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HR Magazine Different Slant: Modern Organisation Models

It was great being recognised as one of HR Magazine's Movers and Shakers last month (and being included on the cover this month - can you spot me? - and how many other influencers can you name???).

However, it's even more brilliant to have my thoughts on modern, people-centric organisation models included this month too. These summarise some of my insights from chapters 6 and 7 of 'The Social Organization', as well as providing a few slight updates on platform and blockchain based organisations too.

The full magazine is available to view or download here (you'll find my Different Slant article on pages 36-8).

And if you read it (and you should), do let me know what you think.

I'll also be publishing some more thoughts (somewhere between the high level review in the HR Magazine article and the detailed treatment in my book) on Linkedin - do check and follow / connect with me there too.

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IntranetNow: Insights from Strategic Organisation Design

I presented at Intranet Now on Friday. It was my first time at this event and I thought Wedge and Lisa did an amazing job - not only was the event as social as you'd expect a community generated conference to be, it was also more professionally organised than many professional ones. Well done both, and to all the helpers too.

In my own presentation, I wanted to make the same sorts of points I talked about at Digital Workplace Experience last year that the intranet / digital workplace needs to be seen as part of a broader organisation model.

Tony Stewart's tweet and video of me introducing my Organisation Prioritisation Model is here, and no, I don't know what I was doing with my arms either.

In addition, this year's conference focused on strategic impact and whilst we'd been talking about intranet strategies and content strategies, etc, I wanted to explain that having strategies isn't the same as being strategic. If this term is to mean anything, then it has to be about playing a direct role in creating competitive advantage (see my interview with Michael Porter). Not just aligned with or supporting this, but creating some of it through the intranet's indirect or direct impact on human or social capital, or acting as an aspect of organisation capital, helping a business set new or more stretching business goals.

Being strategic is always about differentiation and the key need here is to link the intranet; the connections it supports;  the type of information it provides; and the way it provides this to the way people work, and in particular, the type of groups and networks within the organisation.

• So if what matters most is the organisational infrastructure, then the organisation probably wants to organise using traditional functions, and will be best of with a traditional / social intranet like Interact.

• If what matters is the work, it should probably use horizontal teams, and may need to base or build its digital workplace around something like Slack or Teams.

• If it's people, then the organisation should look at using communities, including community based systems like Verint / Telligent, or more broadly Workplace by Facebook.

• If the connections between the people, then it needs to look at distributed networks and tools like Yammer, Aurea / Jive or HCL Connections.

By the way, social tools all get a lot of focus these days, but most organisations are still build upon traditional functions, and it's still the 'standard' intranet that often best fits the way people work in these organisations.

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Social Leadership CoLab HRD Summit 2020

I'll be running a session at the next HRD Summit in Birmingham on 3 and 4 February 2020.

My session is a CoLab (collaborative solution focused discussion) on Social Leadership: 

Social Leadership

Social Leadership: A leadership style the focuses on the development of groups and networks, rather than just individuals working in functions. 

Many businesses are making more use of horizontal teams (process, project, agile, etc.); communities and networks. Some organisations have all of these in place at once. The requirements for leading each of these differ, yet so far there has been little thinking about how leaders need to act differently, firstly, from the traditional focus on leading individuals, and secondly, across each type of group, e.g. in leading a community compared to leading a project team.

In addition, leaders may be leading different groups at the same time, so how can they develop the dexterity to change styles and approaches across the different groups they participate in? 

This CoLab will explore the ways leaders can be supported in growing their social leadership capabilities.

Tuesday 4th February 2020

14:00 - 15:00

See this post for more explanation too.

Hope to see you there, and let me know if you're after a guest pass (senior, strategic HR practitioners only).

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Dave Ulrich: The Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE)

Yeung and Ulrich - Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE)

This is my second post reviewing and providing my insights on Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich’s new book, Reinventing the Organization.

My last post on this suggested that Dave’s new organisational logic means that we need to think about what happens outside of an organisation before we look at its internal arrangements.

However, for me, my logic from The Social Organization (TSO) still applies, ie we need to understand the capabilities an ecosystem will provide and the principles it uses in doing this in order to identify the most optimal organisational solution for a particular environmental context.

For Dave and Arthur, the key thing about the external environment is that it is uncertain and fast changing - or superdynamic. This means organisations need to be more market oriented, and they suggest the key ecosystem capabilities an ecosystem needs to provide are information, customer, innovation and agility.

Josh Bersin - network of teams

They also suggests some ecosystem principles (which provide a basis for an ecosystem’s common shared values / style) to respond to the new environment:

• Establish a consistent set of priorities
• Create the future by anticipating what the market will be
• Win through a focus on growth
• Stay a step ahead of the market by anticipating targeted and future customers
• Effectively use different options to execute a growth pathway: buy, build or borrow
• Seek and inspire agile employees
• Use scorecards and data to drive a growth mindset
• Always reinvent strategy because strategy is never finished.

In this environment, and with these capabilities and principles, they suggests the best organisational solution for any company is a Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE).

The book reviews seven main case studies of this organisational form - Amazon, Facebook and Google in Silicon Valley and their digital cousins - Alibaba, DiDi, Huawei and Tencent  in China (as well as Supercell in Finland, which is a bit of an outlier, organisationally as well as geographically, as explained below).

The MOE is first of all, an ecosystem (generally defined to mean a network which extends beyond an individual firm). Given the logic reviewed above, a MOE is deliberately designed to involve external allies - partners providing staff, skills, structures and systems and stakes in the ecosystem.

Niels Pflaeging - value creation structure

But the MOE resembles an ecosystem within the orchestrating organisation too, with autonomous teams (cells) working alongside each other through a network rather than as a result of hierarchical coordination. Amazon’s single threaded teams is a great example. And I think this logic works - if an organisation is cellular internally, it also makes it easy to work with cells which are outside. It also provides the customer focus required by the MOE (see TSO on horizontal teams).

The other distinguishing feature of the MOE is that this uses a digital platform to support the operating network. As I noted in TSO, it’s quite hard to scale a network without a common platform, so this makes good sense too. It also provides most of the required information and agility, and together with the cells, innovation. The use of a platform makes the MOE a highly centralised ecosystem though. (Work is done autonomously within the cells, but the leadership of the ecosystem is centralised under the platform owning part of the MOE.)

Note, however, that I don’t think Dave and Arthur are referring to what I would call a platform based organisation where a digital platform enables autonomous groups to work together without hierarchical management or other forms of co-ordination. (I think the best example of a platform based organisation is Haier who also presented at the Drucker Forum last year. If you’ve not seen it, then Gary Hamel has provided a great case study of this company / platform / ecosystem in HBR recently. I particularly like this example because Haier’s platform treats internal and external micro enterprises in just about the same way, so it’s much more similar to a biological ecosystem than a MOE.)

Dave Gray - podular organisation

Instead of this, MOEs just use platforms to support the network (rather than the network being constructed on the platform). For example, Facebook’s internal use of Workplace is included as an example. Workplace as a product is a digital platform as it provides apps through the system, and it’s also an organisational platform as it enables cell based and multi-company networking, but it’s not a platform based organisation platform (!).

My favourite case study is Tencent as I think this makes Dave and Arthur’s ideas about platforms very clear. “Tencent shares its expertise and resources in technology, legal affairs, government affairs, and talent and organisation management with its strategic partners. For instance, Tencent offers technological and service infrastucture through Tencent Cloud…” In addition, Arthur's in-house consulting team “offers consulting, training, and coaching support to help key strategic partners upgrade their leadership, key talent, and organisational capabilities”.

Therefore, although the platform fits mainly within the structure element of an organisational systems model, there can also be an aspect which is more about the style that people work in, within and across their organisations, too.

Of course, none of this that new. That's not a criticism of the idea or the book, in fact it reinforces the suggestion that this is happening, and it is important.

Michael Arena - adaptive space

However, if you've not come across some of these examples of platform enabled organisation, then firstly, it already exists in Dave and Arthur’s case study organisations, even if this is largely limited to two main geographies.

But it’s also not that new in terms of the ideas being articulated as an organisation form. Eg the book's platform enabled organisations are similar to the following models which I have illustrated throughout this post:

• Josh Bersin's network of teams (though this doesn't demand a platform)
• Niels Pflaeging's value creation structure (with the informal network formalised through the platform)
• Dave Gray's podular organisation (with a more formalised version of the technological part of his backbone making up for a less significant cultural aspect) 
• Michael Arena's entrepreneurial teams and communities (once again, with the adaptive space network formalised through the platform)
• McKinsey's agile organisation
• BCG's dynamic platform structure
• My own melded network organisation, from TSO.

In TSO, I focus internally within organisations so I only touch on external ecosystems. (I also don’t put much focus on internal platforms as I wanted to write about organisational management rather than the use of market mechanisms. In fact, for me, this is the best thing about Dave’s book - it’s packed full of case study evidence about platform enabled organisations and closely linked organisation forms.)

McKinsey - agile organisation

I agree, and do state, that internal and external are becoming more blurred. But for me, the best thing for most organisations to do is sort out their internal organisation - before they grapple with the additional complexity outside. These organisations can still create internal networks of teams, and use internal platforms.
 
In fact, although Dave’s organisational logic suggests we need to look externally, beyond a single organisation, before we look internally, most of the book’s examples focus on their internal networks of teams, not the way their ecosystem involve allies from outside the organisation.

In particular, the book’s other main case study, Supercell in Helsinki, is a great example of a network of teams approach. However, this company doesn’t really do much externally. Yes, it has partners with shared resources, as most organisations do these days, but I don’t see any evidence of an external ecosystem. And the company’s website provides interesting points about its team focus but says nothing to suggest it followed Dave’s new organisational logic in developing this.

Dave also suggests Amazon first created its capabilities within the organisation and only later magnified this throughout its ecosystem.

BCG - dynamic platform structure

Dave’s case studies also demonstrate that the model is fairly flexible in the way it is applied and suggests that it can be extended to other, non digital sectors, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, consulting and other professional services. For example, Walgreens / WBA’s stores and organisational management systems are seen as MOE cells and platform too. Now I’ve worked with Boots here, which is a great company, but not what I would understand as an ecosystem or even less so, a platform enabled organisation. But then if the model is going to potentially extend to any organisation I think you do need to interpret it quite loosely.

My insights from this are:

• I do think it will be useful to look externally at potential parters and the opportunities for creating an ecosystem before focusing on internal organisation design (see TSO for how to do this internal piece). I’m fully persuaded of this evolution in organisational thinking.
• This won’t always result in creating a MOE or even an external ecosystem and that is fine.
• Regardless of this, creating an internal network of teams is an increasingly good idea. It provides many of the benefits of an MOE with less bother, and provides a great basis to extend externally later on as well (and one again, see TSO for how to create this internal network of teams, or other melded network options).

Jon Ingham - melded network organisation

More on creating a MOE in my next post.

(This is the last one: http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2019/09/dave-ulrich-reinventing-organization-MOE.html.) 

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Social Leadership panel, plus Linda Hill and Julian Stodd

I participated in a panel at Symposium's Talent and Leadership Development conference earlier this month. The panel was on social leadership, which I thought was an interesting though rather surprising topic to be discussed in this sort of form. And I was even more surprised when the conference chair opened the session by suggesting that social leadership was an increasingly topical term.

However, I was pleased by the suggestion and do believe that social leadership is something we should be talking about, although I'm still not sure that many people are.

If it is a topical term, then this must be mainly due to the efforts of Julian Stodd, author of the Social Leadership Handbook, as well as various other linked publications and his blog. 

For Julian, social learning and leadership are required responses to the current Social Age, enabled by digital technology. I disagree with Julian on quite a bit of this. I don't think social collaborative technologies are a key part of social leadership, though they are certainly part of the reason that social leadership is needed. But leadership needs to be social however it's done, the technologies are just tools to help do it.

I also don't agree that social leadership subverts hierarchy. Hierarchical leadership isn't going to go away (neither are work, jobs or careers) and needs to be social as well.

And I don't agree that women are going to continue to earn less than men in the Social Age. I deal with this in The Social Organization. Social leadership is very much based on traits traditionally linked to women. This doesn't mean than men can't learn and demonstrate them, but it's often not the most natural way for many incompetent men to behave. The future belongs to socially competent women, and a few men, and rewards are going to shift to what's really important in this new world (I talked about this in my reward presentation in California too).

I'm also much more positive about HR!

But I do love Julian's key ideas about social leadership, eg that it is "authentic, grounded and free to anyone to develop, adapt and share. The starting point is 'How can I help you succeed?, not 'How can I get you to do...?'" And that humility sits at the heart of it. I also love the way that Julian acts as a social leader personally too. I may be an influencer / mover and shaker, and this can only be based on personal rather than positional influence (since I don't have a traditional position). But it's also achieved in rather traditional and perhaps rather egocentric, rather than more modern or social ways. I believe social leadership is important but I'm not putting myself forward as a role model of a social leader!

However, social leadership is something which is now being talked about by other people, even if they don't use the term. For example, at the California HR conference at the end of August, where I was speaking about reward innovation, my favourite session was from Linda Hill, author of Collective Genius. Linda spoke about leading innovation, but explained that this is about encouraging creative abrasion - a diversity of often competing and conflicting ideas; creative agility - testing ideas eg through design thinking by getting closer to the people you're designing for; and creative resolution - effective decision making vs either compromise or domination. So this is social leadership too.

I agreed with Linda's points, though I thought a lot of this was about organisation, not about leadership. Leaders need to ensure that the right organisation architecture is in place, but they don't necessarily need to design that architecture - this is a specialist competency and responsibility. What leaders need to do is to lead their people, and increasingly the networks between their people. This is the social bit. So I was pleased that Linda also recommended HR helping executives understand the network side of what they do.

However, this shouldn't just be about leaders' own personal, ego networks, which were the focus of Linda's presentation. It needs to extend to the development of broader organisational (and ecosystem) networks too. 

It also needs to extend to leaders' ability to form the right relationships and have effective conversations too. Linda referred to Boris Groysberg's work on leadership as a conversation which I think is great too.

But in my Symposium panel, I suggested that the role of leaders is also more complex than this. Firstly, leadership needs to be much more distributed than it is now. We do need everyone in any organisation to be a leader.

In addition, leaders need to lead all the various groups I refer to in The Social Organization. These include the teams doing the work of the organisation (especially when these are horizontal teams, not just groupings of individuals working in functions); communities of people relating with each other (I think communities can take a broader role than Julian); and the broader, more distributed networks of connections across the organisation. Innovation needs all of these to play an effective role (see Michael Arena, Adaptive Space) so leaders need to lead in each of these spaces too.

The main issue, which I describe in The Social Organization, is that leaders today tend to lose empathy as they rise up the organisational hierarchy (see, for example, Adam Galinsky, Friend & Foe). Is this because we promote and select the wrong people into leadership positions? (yes) Or because increasing power corrupts the people working in leadership positions? (yes as well) Either way, the move towards teams, communities and networks should help reduce the focus on hierarchy which is more evident and impactful in traditional functions.

But at the moment, there's not enough focus on helping executives, and others, develop empathy and humility, plus intimacy, interactivity, inclusion and intentionality, and create and support personal and organisational networks, and harness these in an increasingly varied set of organisational groups. So there are example of organisations that are doing great things in all the aspects of social leadership I've mentioned. And I was very impressed with the stories my co-panelists, Aimee Badcock at Philips and Robert Ritchie at Salford University, were sharing.

But I don't yet know of any companies which have completely transformed their approach to leadership development to do everything I've just listed here (eg differentiating leadership of communities from leadership of horizontal teams). And it is this which I think is now required as an effective response to the Social Age.

I've been doing more work with leadership teams on this agenda recently and do contact me if you want to know more:

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Dave Ulrich: Reinventing the Organization

I continue to be impressed by Dave Ulrich's ability to articulate the future of HR, leadership and organisation. Since my current focus is on organisational management, that applies in particular to Dave's recent focus on organisations, with the suggestion that organisation has four times the value of talent (in Victory through Organization). So I really appreciate Dave writing the Foreword to The Social Organization (TSO) too.

And now, writing with Arthur Yeung, Dave has once again moved his thinking on a significant notch. Reinventing the Organization deals with the formation of the Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE) which I referred to when posting on Dave's and other sessions at the Drucker Forum in Vienna last year.

In many ways I see the book as a follow-on from mine. TSO dealt with the opportunity for melding networks, including the use of platforms, internally. MOE is a build on that, extending the ideas internally and developing them externally too. But I still believe that in the majority of cases, the first useful step to create a MOE might be to develop something more like the melded network from TSO. That then provides a great basis to develop this approach outside of the firm too (see more on this later).

Regardless of where you start, Dave’s book is by far the best book you can read to understand the development of platform based ecosystems, particularly over the last five or so years. It's a deep book, and quite hard going (for me, that's not a negative) so although I've been through the book twice, I need to spend quite a bit longer on it too. Therefore, my notes here summarise my early, rather than fully formed, thoughts.

However, I think I have now got my head around why Dave suggests the book provides an evolution in organisational thinking - a reinvention of the organisation rather than just incremental experimentation. Dave explains this as “reinvention means more than just changing people’s reporting relationships, building teams or announcing a new strategy. You must build a fundamentally new organisation, redefining how your organisation works. Besides understanding and shaping your work setting, you need to change how you coordinate the work, the principles that govern it, and your own and others’ leadership actions.”

If I'm correct, then Dave’s organisational reinvention isn’t about the MOE itself, but the way we see organisations which Dave suggests has progressed from a focus on structure (leading to a focus on hierarchy / bureaucracy) to one on more holistic organisations (the systems view of McKinsey’s 7S or Jay Galbraith’s Star model), and mainly through Dave’s own insights, onto the outcomes or capabilities which an organisation provides. I think TSO develops these ideas further too, describing how organisational forms and other options can be selected to provide the capabilities and organisation principles which are required. That logic applies to the selection of a MOE just as it does a functional, team based or other organisational form. So despite the following diagramme, I don’t think the MOE itself is the radically new idea.

The new idea - and I suppose it’s not that new, but as a result of this book, it’s now more strongly articulated, is that we should always think about an organisation’s ecosystem and not just an individual organisation. Eg I liked the suggestion that MOEs focus on stakeholders more than processes.

So actually, the new logic, I think, is to be clear about the external environment and the required capabilities, and then to develop the ecosystem, systems and structures to support them. I think that this is at least a partial reinvention of organisation design. So I’d adapt the diagramme like this:

 

By the way, the mini-slide I’ve chosen to illustrate capability on the top left in the above diagramme is the one from TSO showing how the different elements of an organisation from the systems perspective can link with the different aspects of capability, ie human, organisation and social capital. I still think that works for an ecosystem too, although the social capital needs to be extended to what I normally call relationships capital, which is the value of the connections and relationships outside of the single organisation.

 

You could argue, and maybe this is what Dave is doing, that the traditional ways of seeing systems and structures needs to be replaced by the key features of the MOE, which I explain in a later post. However, I don’t think that’s so. MOEs still have the 7S’s structures, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills, or the Star model’s people, rewards, processes and structure (see the ecosystem model from IRC4HR below), or whatever other set of elements you pick (eg in TSO I present the Organisation Prioritisation Model which focuses on work, infrastructure, people and connections as well as a largish number of organisation and HR enablers, which might not be a reinvention but is, I think, a bit more suited to today’s organisations, and ecosystems too).

Assuming that a reinvented organisation has got to have a particular feature takes us back to the first step in Dave’s evolution diagramme when we assumed all organisations had to have a hierarchical, functional structure, just with a more modern equivalent replacing this. I don’t see that as helpful and certainly don’t believe it would contribute to more evolved thinking. Much better to start with a set of core elements and then build up from there.

It’s still helpful to have an archetype. Dave’s three legged stool for HR is a good example of this, but that’s different to saying all HR organisations need to have three legs. Or that all organisations need to have a platform.

Dave actually suggests there are three archetypal MOEs but I’m just going to review their basic features - see my next MOE related post over the next few days for more on this.

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New opportunities in strategic HR

So I got into a bit of a rant with HRD Connect about people strategy.

It's probably not my best argued article but it might be one of my most passionate?

And look, I know many companies are doing this, but not enough. And for many, the ideas around creating value and people based business strategy are still completely new.

So they may be looking after their people reasonably well, sure, but are they thinking about their people as the centre of their strategic success? - doing that makes a lot of difference in my experience.

More on HRD Connect's site: https://www.hrdconnect.com/2019/09/18/three-new-opportunities-in-strategic-hr/.

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HR Mover and Shaker

It's great to be included in HR Magazine's lists of HR most influentials again this year, and to meet so many other great HR people at the awards ceremony last night too.

Many thanks to Jenny Roper and all the judges.

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Top UK HR blog

Thanks to Changeboard for including Strategic HCM as one of its top 15 UK HR blogs for HR professionals to bookmark (and hopefully read!) in 2019. 

“Employee experience and journey mapping are great, but can feel a bit like putting shiny engagement lipstick on a clunky organisational pig!” (Jon Ingham, 2019)

Jon Ingham is a consultant, author and speaker. His HR posts may be relatively infrequent (expect a few every month), but they’re consistently fascinating, and have been so since he first started his blog in 2007. Jon makes it easy to subscribe to his blog, too – as you’d expect from someone who’s professionally comfortable with technology. He was named one of the Top 100 HRTech influencers in 2019.

Twelve years after I started blogging I'm still delighted whenever someone tells me they read this blog, never mind finding it fascinating!

 I've told Changeboard I'm going to post a bit more regularly now too!

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing 
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD   
• Contact me to create more value for your business  
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com