How can average companies become good and how can we move good companies to become great companies? How can we stimulate real growth that will endure the dynamics of change? How do we preserve the great core as well as attain progress both as an organisation and in the lives of those we serve? What values do we subscribe to and what culture have these earned us over the years? These are critical questions that we must provide answers to as a business entity all the time.
Questions and questions. Now, it is said that if we are not deficit or found wanting of good questions, we will not be deficit or found wanting of good answers. Good questions are the tonic to boost great thinking and reasoning. Good questions are keys with which we open and unlock great doors of treasure and access huge wealth that can be tapped for the benefit of many, if not all.
However uncomfortable questions may be, if they hold potential value, we must endeavour to ask them because through embracing such discomfort, we are able to access and earn great comfort. It is difficult to achieve easy, but once we are willing to go through the grind, we should be able to make tough things easy. And one great support to make this happen throughout the process is to be able to always ask the right questions.
Great companies have been and will always be because of what they do, how they do what they do and their reasons or motives for doing what they do. Some companies moved from nothing to something. Some great Category A companies began in garages, wooden shed, and rooms of men: Amazon, Apple, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell, Virgin, Harley-Davidson, and Google.
They had nothing outside perhaps their skewed and obscured visions in their minds. They had nothing outside their raw gifts and talents. They had sheer guts. They had intuition and instincts. They had neither money nor infrastructure. But the sheer willpower they had was sufficient to change the world through their entrepreneurial and innovative ingenuity. They had the guts to challenge status quo and disrupt the space.
Great companies are visionary companies. They had audacious visions of where they desired to be. Jim Collins and Jerry Porass referred to such great visions as big, hairy and audacious. Such visionaries saw tomorrow, today and they worked on their visions. They envisioned going somewhere and they paid the price to get there.
Companies like General Electric, and others like Hewlett-Packard did not just have audacious visions, their vision, however audacious, was not just enough for them. They worked to manifest their vision by attracting the right talent. Clearly expressing an audacious vision in simple and lucid language helps others to connect with it. It does not have to be convoluted. It gets easy to indoctrinate employees and builds a culture of trust through adopting and inculcating the right values. They live the values beyond words or telling.
A great team is not just a body of men and women working together. It is a group of trusted people. Trust is built from upholding transperent values from leaders, talking about visionaries down to management and the least members of staff. The tough culture of equality is practised beyond what is written on company documents and walls. That culture is entrenched deeply.
These teams are built to collaborate with each other and among one other. This culture is a thriving and enduring one that is embedded in the DNA of all members of staff. Usually, it is possible to make this happen where leadership and management exemplify these traits to the emulation of all others.
Thriving and enduring companies are learning and developing entities. This is why curiosity and creativity are key learning milestones. With these, innovation happens inhouse beyond regular thinking. Such companies grow intrapreneurs. These are entrepreneurs within their firms. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is a great example of this culture of innovation to grow intrapreneurs who despite their great innovation stay with the organization.
A firm that keeps learning keeps making itself relevant in its space. Learning makes us pliable and adaptable to change. Until positive change in behaviour happens, learning cannot be said to have taken place. This way, companies stimulate growth and make themselves amenable to change always. As a matter of fact they are responsible for making change happen because they are innovative since they are always in the learning mode.
What could be responsible for this rare talent retention and sustainability culture? Employee motivation and reward system is more than an allure. Employees more than feel like they are members of the organization. They indeed are members because a sense of belonging is created with all candour. Employees find no reason not to buy into the system.
Thus, there is shared ownership between ownership and employees. Employees own their jobs through sustained performance because they do not only feel a sense of belonging, they do have a sense of belonging. They own their actions and therefore own the business.
What is core to an organization is a function of your belief system. What you believe in as a company determines your core. An outfit that sets out to maintain art has a different understanding of what success is. Success may not be in financial terms. They may do everything to maintain art and not bother about scaling. This way, maintaining art preserves your core and this determines continuous customer satisfaction and success. Growth of this kind provides a rare balance for all stakeholders.
Values are the software that run the engine of organizational systems. The right values are the dynamics that keep the mechanics in motion. With the great values of discipline, integrity, team spirit, learning synergy and more, great cultures can be built and sustained.
Small companies can grow and sustain growth along the lines of their avowed beliefs. Vision is kept in focus and tenaciously pursued based on the promise made to the customers and other stakeholders. Without the right values and the living of same, organizations are stunted and they eventually go extinct.
By staying relentlessly innovative, obsessed over the customers, ignore the stock market, know the difference between good and bad failures, Jeff Bezos built Amazon, one of the biggest and most influential companies through developing a distinct leadership ethos. It is interesting to note that almost after 5 years of Amazon going public, it witnessed losses for stakeholders, yet, investors stayed with it. It is more than three decades now.
The understanding that failure is a companion of innovation is an interesting one in all of these. Once an organization is born, because of the living entity that it is, it can only grow, but this growth has to be intentional and deliberate so that outcomes can be premeditated for all stakeholders.
Moments of growth are moments of mistakes, where we rise and fall. This reality is one we cannot run away. With each good failure, our roots are sent deeper into the earth where we are more firmly rooted. Businesses are not any way different. Each good failure gets them to endure, but repeated bad failures, a result of wrong values leading to poor mission delivery, takes them out of the game.
