The Effective Enterprise
53
loyalties. Factors of product and service characteristics (in
order of importance) are:
6
— Consistent product quality and conformance to
specifications
— Dependable delivery of products and services
— Product features — high-performance products
— Fast
and reliable deliveries
— Low prices of goods and services
— Flexibility — new product introduction
— Flexibility — quick design changes by customer
request
— Broad product line
— After-sales service
— Broad distribution
— Rapid volume change — support of just-in-time (JIT)
— Effective promotion and advertising
— Proactive and decisive to escape avoidable problems, exploit
opportunities, and ensure competitive leadership.
— Fiscally conservative to ascertain
that the enterprise consis-
tently is financially healthy.
— Providing stable and predictable working conditions for
employees throughout the enterprise regardless of necessary
changes.
— Avoiding personnel layoffs and reducing personnel turnover
to provide workforce security and trust, retain access to per-
sonal IC assets, and minimize personnel and hiring costs.
4. Employee Engagement Behavior
The degree to which employees are engaged in their work is
repeatedly found to be a major factor associated with enterprise
productivity.
7
In
most organizations, people are deeply engaged
in their work less than 20 percent of the time on the average.
Instead of being deeply engaged, they perform much of their
work by rote without examining what situations might require
beyond what is normal. Desirable employee engagement behav-
ior often reflects a deeper mentality and tends to be:
— Aware that they have the understanding to do things “right”
— this awareness provides employees with the security and
motivation to engage.
— Focused on “doing the right thing,” particularly when it
requires adjusting actions to different circumstances —
instead of treating each situation as routine.
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54
People-Focused Knowledge Management
— Considering the implementation of every task as an
integral part of implementing enterprise strategy (remember
the Ritz-Carlton and Inter-Continental
hotel staffs in
Chapter 1).
— Quick to pursue critical thinking and other fundamental
approaches in complicated and unusual situations.
— Delivering “completed staff work.”
8
— Practicing “closing the loop” by reporting back.
5. Stakeholder Supportive Behavior
The outstanding enterprise knows its stakeholders and
how they are valuable to the enterprise’s performance and
viability. The enterprise also understands its responsibilities
toward the stakeholders — that it is relied upon to provide
economic returns to owners, secure livelihoods to employees,
provide the town or area where it operates with services, prod-
ucts, and economic support through
its payroll and sourcing,
and so on. The supportive behaviors tend to be:
— Concerned with an understanding of stakeholders’ needs,
objectives, and welfare to fulfill them to the greatest extent
possible and to build support and loyalty.
— Responsible and accountable for actions that affect
shareholders.
— Socially oriented and understand that the enterprise has
obligations and responsibilities toward its stakeholders and
society in general.
— Environmentally oriented by considering secondary and ter-
tiary environmental effects from actions.
6. Competitive Behavior
A significant behavior characteristic of the enterprise is its
competitiveness — its ability to deliver competitive value and
attract customers to choose its products and services over com-
peting ones. Competitive behaviors
take many forms and are
driven by several underlying factors such as dealing compe-
tently with customers in friendly and efficient ways while max-
imizing both customers’ and the enterprise’s objectives. The
behaviors involve individuals, teams, departments, and larger
entities and tend to be:
— Competitive in spirit with commonly shared desires “to be
the best.”
— Competent, informed, efficient, expedient, reliable, respon-
sible, quality conscious in all work and planning.
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The Effective Enterprise
55
— Understanding of customers and
their customers to be able
to deliver products and services of greater value and cost
effectiveness than their competitors.
— Advanced and leading — but practical, innovative, and curi-
ous about how things can be done better.
— Communicating competitive and other intelligence quickly
and targeted together with critical evaluations of how reli-
able the intelligence is and what it might mean.
— Versatile, agile, and flexible, with the capabilities to quickly
change directions when conditions warrant it.
— Bold, proactive,
quick-acting, anticipatory, goal oriented,
and farsighted, with wide horizons for the purpose of being
better than competitors.
Successful Performance Is Durable
The key to corporate longevity is to create a company that lives (i.e.,
learns and adapts), has a deep sense of self, and looks beyond the
profit-driven economic model to invest in people and knowledge (de
Geus 1997).
In his research Arie de Geus found that enterprises that have been
successful over very long periods — more than a century — share
four characteristics:
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