| Table of Contents
Emerging Principles
Chapter 1: The Conductive Organization
- New technologies impacting on human communication drive new organizing principles and structures.
- Technology is short-circuiting all the linear ways in which we've structured our organizations.
- A highly conductive organization has formulated a new way of looking at the world through the eyes of the customer.
- Strategy making is an activity that improves as the organizational membrane becomes more porous so that everyone relates to achieving an elevated customer experience.
- A new order of risk is associated with increased reliance on intangible assets-it's more complex, difficult to detect and lethal if ignored.
- High-quality relationships support core values.
- The brand is a qualitative reflection of the organization's character as expressed by its core values.
- Performance gives freedom to be who we want to be, to express our collective greatness as individuals, to actualize our full potential, and to realize our destiny.
- Three generative capabilities in a highly conductive organization are learning, collaborating and strategy making. These capabilities give the organization the inherent ability to renew itself as it encounters new challenges.
- Strategy making is an action verb as opposed to a noun or an object. It's an embedded process as opposed to a finite set of activities in a defined time cycle. It's a key capability geared to ensure constant renewal-creating relevance in the marketplace.
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Chapter 2: The Customer Imperative
- One of the greatest risks an organization can face is to become misaligned with the customer at the operational and strategic levels.
- Breakthrough performance is improbable without developing frequent and close customer calibration as a distinctive capability.
- Owning the customer is neither a reasonable aspiration nor a sensible one.
- The conductive organization can generate capabilities at the speed the market requires them.
- First-mover advantage evolves from real-time learning with the customer.
- Customers are looking to shape solutions and transactions specifically to fit their needs. They want their preferences remembered with each transaction.
- An organization with first-mover advantage is so well calibrated to the needs of its customers that it shapes the market based on its strengths-the capabilities that it has generated in real time by learning with the customer.
- High-performing organizations know how to build and maintain the relationships that are the conduits for knowledge flow, leveraging capabilities and strategy-making processes.
- The new customer imperative requires a systematic and continuous alignment of capabilities throughout the organization.
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Chapter 3: The Knowledge Capital Model
- It's only through the interaction of human, structural, and customer capital that value is created.
- An organization's intangible assets are made of capabilities and relationships that are built through the exchange of knowledge.
- A challenge for corporate leaders is to create the capabilities for the organization to enable the exchange of tacit knowledge and the access to explicit knowledge.
- The adoption of values-based leadership throughout the organization will lead to greater alignment and enhance the creation of value through knowledge exchange.
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Chapter 4: Customer Calibration
- A traditional organization focuses on customer retention, a leading organization focuses on customer satisfaction, and an innovative or conductive organization focuses on customer success.
- The closer the supplier is to the customer, the greater propensity for value-creating innovation.
- Gapless co-experiencing with the customer will come from suspending one's mindsets as a supplier in order to truly listen to the customer.
- The relationship between the organization and its distributor networks is a significant part of each organization's structural capital.
- The ability of an organization to partner will depend in large part on its culture and the leadership that drives it.
- Customer calibration is a constant process that informs all of the organization's thinking, actions, and relationships, enabled by the quality and speed of its knowledge flows.
- Innovation results from sharing information and creating knowledge to constantly find new ways to deliver relevant, high-quality solutions to customers.
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Chapter 5: Strategy Making
- It doesn't matter how solid the other organizational capabilities are-performance will falter if the organization's strategy is not relevant to the customer.
- The weight of all other capabilities combined can't fill the void of a misguided strategy.
- A strategy is an objective, something you arrive at, a conclusion. Strategy making is an action, a process that you follow, a capability.
- Generating capabilities to realize recalibrated strategies is a new constant that keeps the customer at the center of a highly conductive organization.
- The quality of knowledge flow in the organization can be improved by engaging people in conversations geared to develop a better understanding of the business's strategic context.
- People can increase the quality of knowledge flow in the organization by understanding the strategic context of the business.
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Chapter 6: Internal and External Branding: The Character of the Conductive Organization
- An authentic and effective brand is based on the trust that flows from a congruent customer and employee experience.
- Customers are more interested in purchasing a solution that resonates with the way they wish to experience the world, that is congruent with the values they hold, and that corresponds to their aspirations. The brand becomes a mechanism for facilitating new conversations among the conductive organization, its employees and its customers.
- With the development of a strong brand, the aspirations of the organization are brought in line with those of its customers and employees.
- The brand must be inextricably linked to the values of the organization. An effective brand hinges on the fundamental connection between the organization's collective values and customer experience. If there is a breakdown in that experience, there is a foundation in place to repair it because common principles have been identified.
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Chapter 7: Culture: The Collective Mindsets of the Conductive Organization
- Having a culture that is engaged in fulfilling the customer imperative relies on having employee values focused in the same direction-on the customer.
- Employees are more likely to commit to an organization whose values are congruent to their own.
- Values are internalized ideals. They are priorities that guide us in making everyday choices and shape our behavior.
- We need diversity to respond to the diverse values of the customer.
- Adherence to well-defined corporate values allows the organization to accelerate change without losing the trust of its employees.
- Culture is a key enabler of business performance. It can make or break strategies.
- Organizational cultures have very deep roots that have spread out unseen yet are pervasive through time.
- Attempting to change culture without acknowledging with great respect and humility its historical roots is disastrous.
- Four key cultural characteristics are prerequisites for creating a high performance culture: self-initiation, trust, interdependence, and partnering.
- Self-initiation represents a major shift from industrial to knowledge paradigms.
- In the knowledge era, loyalty-based contracts are becoming increasingly obsolete.
- Re-engaging the employee base is a central challenge for the managers in mitigating risk of strategic failure.
- It's incumbent on organizations to view employees first and foremost as a business of one.
- Trust should permeate all relationships that the organization enters into-with customers, employees and partners.
- Mistrust is one of the biggest barriers to conductivity.
- A culture of interdependence is one in which employees listen to each other with the goal of creating new capabilities.
- Culture is the gatekeeper that regulates behaviour.
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Chapter 8: Structure: The Custodians of Conductivity
- The most exciting organizational structural experiments over the next decade will be dismantling industrial-era functions and replacing them with knowledge-era configurations.
- The conventional human resources function is essentially obsolete.
- Employees need to be self-initiated in their own development plans.
- If the organization is to live its core values, people need to share a strong sense of membership in the organization.
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Chapter 9: Systems: Generating Capabilities
- Knowledge is the capability to take effective action.
- Learning is the process of turning information into knowledge to take effective action.
- The systematic management of knowledge is fast becoming a strategic capability.
- Employees must assume responsibility for knowledge exchange as a key part of their learning and capability development-as part of the way they do their work.
- The rate of learning must equal or exceed the rate at which the marketplace changes.
- Enhancing learning continually improves existing systems and existing patterns of behaviour.
- The first condition for effective learning is self-initiation.
- E-training is a push mode; e-learning is a pull mode.
- Knowledge and learning are at the core of capability generation.
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Chapter 10: A New Leadership Agenda
- Leadership is a capability that must be encouraged and nurtured within all employees, not just the few who sit at the top of the organization chart
- The ability to configure and reconfigure business processes and capabilities, to continually calibrate to the customer, is central to the leadership agenda today.
- Leadership's responsibility is to ensure that systems and structures are in place to enable members of a value-creation network to collaborate, learn, share knowledge, and execute their responsibilities.
- Recognition that all employees have a mandate to exercise their leadership capabilities moves the organization to a self-initiated culture that has the capabilities to create and maintain high-trust relationships both internally and externally.
- A set of leadership values that are non-negotiable is key for mitigating governance risk.
- Where fear predominates, people will hide mistakes, not take risks, and become competitive with their colleagues.
- It's becoming a critical organizational and leadership capability to be able to create and leverage participation in network-designed and network-delivered solutions.
- Leadership operates through the assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of cross-disciplinary teams, which may also include customers and/or partners.
- Understanding customer aspirations and creating the capabilities to service customers' articulated and unarticulated needs requires a special set of generative capabilities-learning, collaborating, and strategy making.
- Great organizations learn how to articulate the purpose, or meaning, of their corporations in ways that transcend everyday business constructs and inspire all who come into contact with the corporation.
- All employees should be encouraged and enabled to develop their leadership skills for their own benefit and in congruence with the requisite leadership behaviours of the organization.
- When leadership values and behaviours are culturally protected, contradictory behaviour is quickly identified because the leadership principles have been collected, adopted, agreed upon and institutionalized.
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