Seven Dimensions Improve Organizational Intelligence

The "No Unhappy Owners" episode will never be erased from the history of the Ford Motor Company! In the early 1980s, the company's senior marketers hoped to conjure up a lively ad that would give potential car buyers an idea of how great the company's products were. Backed by a massive media budget, Ford launched a weekend advertising blitz on national television with fanfare. Between football games, evening news, and entertainment coverage, the company's advertisements declared that once they owned a Ford, there would be "no unhappy owner."

Regrettably, Ford did not mention this campaign to its thousands of dealers across the United States. The original meaning of the advertising slogan is "if you are not satisfied with the Ford product you have, we will solve it for you", which means that if you think your Ford car is not satisfactory, then you can go back to the dealer and get a satisfaction. s solution. As a result, by Monday, all dealerships' premises were packed with "unhappy owners" demanding the satisfactory answers the company had promised. Dealers had to rush into the field without knowing it in advance, struggling to meet this difficult challenge, while car owners continued to complain and Ford's reputation in the market was tarnished.

What made such a big mistake? Why can't all the smart, creative and well-prepared experts work together to achieve good goals? Why do some organizations keep making the same mistakes over and over again?

A company may gather many talented people, but if the collective intelligence or organizational IQ of the company cannot be fully utilized, the company will become incompetent!

Organizational intelligence is the ability of an organization to fully mobilize all of its intelligence, focusing primarily on those intelligences that contribute to the organization's mission. Organizational IQ consists of seven key dimensions: strategic vision, shared mission, desire for change, organizational willingness, alignment, knowledge allocation, and performance pressure.

SAS: A Reversal of Strategic Vision

Every business needs a strategic vision—an organizing principle that defines a certain destiny that the business is striving to achieve, and a way to create, develop, and express a business purpose Ability. Business leaders must ask questions such as: Who are we? What is the purpose of our existence? What is the overarching value proposition on which we live? Why does the world accept us and reward us for what we do? Do we have a formal and rigorous process for scanning the environment?

An organization without a sense of purpose and direction will not be able to mobilize the other six dimensions of organizational intelligence. The dimension of strategic vision assumes that organizational leaders are able to articulate a successful idea and revise it as necessary.

Take Scandinavian Airline System (SAS), which became the darling of the airline industry in the early 1980s. In 1980, the charismatic Swede Jan Carlzon became the CEO of SAS. Under his leadership, SAS achieved a dramatic reversal! The company's aviation business has never been profitable before, and its profits come mainly from the company's role as a broker and dealer in the aircraft market. Under Carlsson's leadership, SAS has created value-added customer experiences based on the many "moments of truth" that occur in managing the day-to-day excellence of service. In 1981, Carlsson managed to get the company out of the quagmire of a loss of $8 million, with sales revenue of $2 billion and a net profit of $71 million. Meanwhile, other airlines in continental Europe lost more than $2 billion in total.

Carlsson's magic, in addition to the "SAS" experience, the concept of "service management" began to surface - really "unintentional", SAS' strategic vision is based on this concept on the basis.

For almost 10 years, SAS has been on a roll. As the world economy recovers, the company thrives. SAS consolidated its control of the European and transatlantic air travel markets, with steady growth in operating income and profits. The company has extensive marketing partners in Europe and North America and appears to be aiming to become the world leader in the air travel market. SAS is a powerful and respected company. During good times, it gets its fair share of profits. The company also actively participates in various forms of marketing alliances, thereby establishing itself as a veritable world-class airline.

Disney: Working together to drive a common mission

If all or most of the employees in the company understand the company's mission, have a sense of common Will work together to achieve the company's vision and goals. This feeling of being "in the same boat" can create a strong sense of community.

On the contrary, if there is no corporate vision or shared success concept, it is impossible for the employees of the company to contribute their due efforts to push the corporate ship along the correct course. Without a shared sense of mission, the tone of a corporate culture will degenerate into a "find the leader" mood.

Disney World has successfully implanted the shared mission dimension of organizational intelligence into every bit of employee behavior. For example, a visitor at Disney World asked the actor where to buy ice cream. While the actor is helping other actors move a massive float to the storage vault, he has to direct the visitor to a nearby kiosk. Unable to escort the tourist to the kiosk in person, the actor took out a walkie-talkie to call a colleague at the kiosk: "A tourist is coming to you, he's wearing a blue T-shirt, and he needs a cup of ice cream. You Can you help him?"

When the tourist arrived at the kiosk, the actor standing there had already bought him the ice cream he needed. "Sir, here's your ice cream," he said with a smile. The visitor is bound to look surprised, but he is certainly unaware that he has become an integral part of this self-designed service experience.

Clever moves like this by employees are apt to show that they are part of the business. This employee has signed his name symbolically on the value proposition the business offers to its customers, and has dedicated all of his energy to putting it into practice.

Ryan Aircraft: Difficulty Leaps in Change

Many organisations are so stubborn in the way they operate, think and deal with their environment that 'change' becomes 'uncomfortable' or even 'painful' the pronoun. For others, change represents opportunities and challenges for new, exciting experiences, and opportunities to solve new things. Deep within these environments, people see the need to reinvent business models as a welcome and stimulating challenge, as an opportunity to learn new ways to succeed. The desire for change must be strong enough to effectively accommodate the changes required by the strategic vision.

For years, Ryan Aeronautical has struggled under the control of traditional-school manufacturing managers and risk-averse financial auditors. The company did not invest a penny of its profits in the development of new products. Costs for all activities like R&D are well controlled, and the budget is mainly used for the bidding and submission of proposals activities required to win contracts. The accountants responsible for the day-to-day operation of the company's financial systems also control the company's bids for various contracts. Instead of using the parametric cost forecasting method commonly used in contemporary times, these finance staff made detailed forecasts to ensure the company was profitable on every project (Editor's note: Ryan & Co. It was acquired by Northrop Grumman, another American military enterprise, in the late 1990s.

As a result, the company has increasingly found itself at a disadvantage against its competitors, both in terms of price and design quality. In its two or three decades of operation, the company has only passively adjusted its product categories in response to changes in government spending.

Management guru Peter Drucker often comments on how organizations and their leaders revel in clinging to the known, the familiar. He advocates "planned quitting," which is knowing when to stop doing things that no longer work. "You have to ask yourself, 'If we don't have an activity today, does it make sense to restart it next?' about every important activity you're currently working on," he said. If it doesn't make sense, then you should consider Give it up."

Agilent: Organizational Willingness to Exceed Expectations

The element "willingness" means willingness to invest beyond the norm. In a business with very little will, employees are often just grounded in getting their job done. In a willing enterprise, employees are willing to put in more effort than leaders expect because they are eager to succeed and believe that their own success and the company's success are inseparable for an instant. They are all convinced that management will be there with the business, whether the economy is booming or not.

Building intentions is an emotional thing. In jobs filled with pressing decisions, setbacks, and risky judgments, leaders must devote considerable energy and time to talking with their employees. This means interacting with employees on a very personal, practical level - explaining to them how the business is going, showing respect and empathy for their struggles, giving them hope, and asking for their help.

The concept of willingness is most vividly expressed in the philosophy of Agilent Technologies. Agilent, a high-tech company spun off from Hewlett-Packard, had to lay off thousands of employees, however, the company has prided itself on insisting that Hewlett's founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's philosophy "The HP Way" - strive to achieve unprecedented friendliness at the employee level. Whether it's the layoff management laws the company has adopted, or the company's consistent history of maintaining a strong community and performance culture, many of the employees who have been laid off are positive about the company's practices rather than feeling cheated or deceived. suffered unfair treatment. Motivation and willingness are closely related. If your organization is still asking questions like "how should we motivate people", then you just don't understand what motivates people. You simply cannot motivate your employees by yourself. Your mistake is to think literally - you mistakenly think that "motivation" is something you impose on your employees, like you are fueling a machine. You have to change that mindset and understand that all you can do is create something that will help motivate your employees, and that is the vision. Motivation comes from meaning, and leadership begins with meaning.

AOL-Time Warner: Aligning Challenges and Mergers

In an intelligent organization, organizational structures, systems, processes, rules, and reward programs work together to drive employees toward the company's mission. Organizational leaders must eliminate most structural contradictions, articulate core value propositions, and drive employees to “work together” to achieve common goals.

The concept of "alignment" has a deeper meaning when two corporate cultures are twisted together. The merger of two organizations means the merger of two cultures—a simple fact that many managers tend to ignore or pay little attention to. It is no exaggeration to say that in most merger cases, the common regret expressed by the parties is that "we underestimated the challenges of bringing the two corporate cultures together."

Take AOL-Time Warner Inc. (America Online-Time Warner) merger, for example, AOL dominates in online entertainment and e-commerce, while Time Warner has market leadership in media products and cable TV operations, and the merger seems to be a win-win option. But from the outset, experts have warned that these two disparate corporate cultures, complemented by different leadership styles and different ideologies espoused by employees, will never merge as easily as chocolate syrup and milk. . The combination of the two is bound to pay a lot of tuition!

In many ways, the AOL-Time Warner merger was more constrained by cultural differences than financial and marketing challenges. AOL CEO Steven Case and Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin come from two different worlds, with very different product philosophies and growth concepts. After the merger of the two companies, Levin and Case run the company as co-CEOs. In the operation of the new company, Li Wen quickly took a secondary role, announcing his retirement for personal reasons only within 2 years of the merger. Li Wen's move opened the door to a race for new leadership and a screening process to see which managers and ideas could prevail.

When leaders of companies involved in a merger fail to anticipate and recognize the people and cultural factors involved in the merger process, they often find themselves in a dilemma, using entrenched institutional arrangements to address culture-based issues. But as they acknowledge and reward the efforts of employees on both sides, and work toward deeper understanding, communication, collaboration, and the building of a sense of commonality, they often find that "institutional" issues aren't always that hard to solve.

Amer: Knowledge Allocation and Sharing Experience

In a complex business environment, the ability to create, transform, organize, share, and apply knowledge is increasingly important. Better than the "knowledge management" that prevails in the IT world at present, knowledge deployment enables enterprises to more effectively utilize the various valuable knowledge resources and information resources they possess. Organizational IQ must allow knowledge to flow freely within the framework of the entire corporate culture, must support and encourage new ideas and inventions, and must be open-minded about questioning the status quo.

An effective way to implement knowledge allocation is to emphasize the experience of sharing knowledge rather than the knowledge itself or the techniques for processing it. In a way, it seems easier to work this way: connect employees to each other, create a communist social view of knowledge, and make knowledge a shared asset for businesses.

Amil, one of South America's largest and most successful health insurers, knows how to deploy knowledge. Its chief executive, Edson de Godoy Bueno, added the title "Chief Training Officer" to his business card. As Brno puts it, this is what his managers and colleagues admired him immensely: "The first priority of Latin American countries is the development of the people. Without education, there is no economic development; without economic development, there is no Jobs are not possible; without jobs, there is no social order. In addition to the CEO, I see myself as the Chief Education Officer. I am committed to helping all Amer employees improve their standard of living, And the strategic move to do that is to help them learn."

Brno is indeed an extraordinary leader who is effective at activating the creative energy and enthusiasm of his employees. Every time he invites a recognized management authority to Brazil to speak to the company's managers, he assigns a small team to peruse the speaker's latest writings for ideas they think might be applicable to the company. or tricks. Then he himself began to learn and apply these concepts and techniques. As a leader, he is convinced that the effective application of knowledge, not the manifestation of knowledge, is the key!

Avon: Performance Pressure Focused on Goals

In an intelligent organization, everyone has a performance proposition, a belief in what should be achieved and the rightness of the organization's goals. Organizational leaders can promote and support this sense of performance pressure, but performance pressure is most effective when it is viewed by all members of the organization as a voluntary set of shared expectations and an operating discipline for success.

The implication of performance pressure is that the organization's resources should be focused on the key areas that are most important and most likely to be profitable. Don't waste your energy and your employees' energy where the company shouldn't be doing it!

Personal skin care and cosmetics maker Avon Products operates largely on a vertical network of amateur door-to-door salespeople. Somehow, the company thought owning a drug company would help it grow better. When Avon's core market stabilized and sales stagnated, the company's top executives began to look for opportunities to diversify. So Avon and entrepreneur John Foster struck a deal to buy the latter's Foster Medical.

Foster tried hard to play his due role in the Avon corporate environment, but left Avon with full of anger less than a year later to start a new business. It wasn't long before Avon took full control of the pharmaceutical company, but eventually split it up and wrote off a huge amount of bad debts.

In the context of strategic planning and focus on performance, it is important to carefully consider the areas where the business can successfully expand. But that doesn't mean that companies shouldn't invest in unfamiliar areas. The premise is that companies must have a solid understanding of the elements needed to be successful, and must know whether the organization has - or can learn - these elements. on the chest.

Organizational IQ and its seven dimensions are essentially intelligence at all levels and leadership at all levels. Granted, those leaders who are formally elected have to do a lot of work to create the conditions that allow organizational intelligence to thrive, but they alone cannot make companies intelligent. All employees of an organization, those who contribute to the organization, and those who have a stake in the organization's success are key players in creating an intelligent enterprise!

This text is adapted from The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational Intelligence in Action by Karl Albrecht with permission. The book was published by AMACOM, a branch of the American Management Association, and the author registered the copyright in 2003. Translated by Li Jian.

The English version of this book is available for purchase from McGraw-Hill Education Asia in Singapore.

Seven Dimensions Improve Organizational Intelligence

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