Fluid enterprise

One of the biggest sources of enterprise fragility is that most leadership actions are episodical, and leadership artifacts (LA) are discrete, analog, and disintegrated. I offer a simple solution to make the enterprise as fluid as water.

As the great American philosopher Mike Tyson put it, everybody has a plan until they get hit.

One of the biggest sources of enterprise fragility is that most leadership actions are episodical, and leadership artifacts (LA) are discrete, analog, and disintegrated. For this reason, the leadership arsenal of vision, strategy, roadmaps, financial plans, and other types of plans rapidly decay and become dysfunctional until they are recreated in the next episode of leadership action. This is not only ineffective but also a huge waste of time, talent, and money.

The conventional approach to address this phenomenon is to parse LA into lower tiers and more frequent rhythms. Making LA discretization smaller, feels like things will behave as if continuous. However, this approach exponentially grows the scale of the mess and waste.

Before diving into a better solution, we must understand why the conventional approach does not work.

1. The conventional approach addresses the symptoms, not the causes. To stylize, if there is a misalignment, throw some roadmapping meetings and PowerPoints. But don’t worry about the 5-why of the misalignment.

2. Coordination complexity increases down the ranks (i.e., the CEO tackles mountains, the CxO tackles big rocks, and the Plant manager tackles thousands of small stones. Boardrooms can make decisions on a 2x2 matrix, and the plant manager has 30+ sheets, each with 50+ columns)

3. Clock rate gets faster down the ranks (i.e. CxO looks at the years ahead, but the Plant Manager looks at :mm part of the clock)

4. Coordination resources decrease down the ranks (i.e. CxO can summon consultants or find internal talent to delegate a roadmapping initiative, but the Plant manager cannot)

5. Power distance gets smaller down the ranks (i.e., the power distance between the CEO and the COO is bigger than it is between the plant manager and the production planner.)

6. The top tier is more about design time, while down the ranks, it is about run time. Run time must observe every dimension and parameter of the logistical reality, but design time has the liberty of abstractions.

As another American philosopher, Bruce Lee, said, “Be water, my friend.” The solution that renders an enterprise as fluid as water boils down to 2 principles:

1. Model-first enterprise for always-integral views

2. Logical atomism for efficiently doing the first principle

Reach out to me, and let’s do it