Enterprise Excellence
4 colors towards Enterprise Excellence
Enterprise Excellence is the result of balancing 4 colored ‘activity paths’: Increase Performance, Create Awareness, Enable Transformation, Solve Issues. It means there is no wrong place to start, you choose the color that fits your current business challenge best.
DO IT: Do the right things right to excel in the here and now
When talking performance, the aim is strengthening your daily operations and quest for continuous improvement. To excel in the here and now, business leaders must keep their eye close to the ball in their business as usual. On top of that, they need to swiftly respond to new opportunities and the flexibility to easily adjust direction with their teams. Since no business product is successful for eternity, innovation and change are inevitable – also in your company. You need to know when, where and how to intervene in your processes, while keeping it all together.
Working on the green activity path, you zoom in and out on the business processes that lead to positive, predictable results. In times with many unknowns, you need to focus on what’s working well, on the strengths in your company to maximize these value creation processes. Since there’s always room for improvement, in parallel you need to increase these profitable business activities by constant critical assessment and fine-tuning.
With the ViCre Value Chain Model, we provide a blueprint to easily navigate, supervise, regulate and interconnect these fruitful processes in your enterprise. Furthermore, we believe maximizing business performance is all about keeping your finger on the pulse of your business, by creating a positive flow, through consistent but flexible procedures and daily routines, endless alignment, repetition and rhythm, across all departments of your enterprise.
FACE IT: Face your enterprise’s challenges to maximize your potential
Choosing yellow means you are humble enough to realise that you don’t possess the truth about your business. It means you and your colleagues are ready to ask questions, many questions. You are craving for fresh knowledge and collaborations to turn ideas and criticism into tangible new business solutions. It means you are therefore willing to explore your intellectual, managerial and operational frontiers and want to challenge your human capital with contemplation and self-analysis. As such, it is probably the least obvious choice for many business leaders, although it’s fundamental on every itinerary towards enterprise excellence. Critical questioning deepens our comprehension, promotes imagination and problem-solving, and will enable you to make full use of your resources.
In yellow space, you create the mental space for a long walk on the beach, a hike in the forest, or even a proverbial mountain trekking if you want, to think things through. It’s a professional ‘free’ (yet clearly defined) zone to discuss new business dreams, to ponder over what different directions to take and help you decide based on conscious choices.
Two exercises are key here. First, make a crystal-clear assessment of (parts of) your current business and make some projections for the future: what are possible scenarios and how to make them reality-proof? Because many new ideas and insights will pop-up, use an appropriate intellectual framework to organise and harvest these waves of inspiration.
But to unlock your full potential, thoughts aren’t enough, you need continuous efforts as well that are clearly explained in a commitment plan. This plan should take into account the desired impact, the necessary activities and key priorities to realize your new dream. It contains a thinking grid to focus on the right details without overlooking the bigger picture, and a hands-on approach template to plot out and visualize the best itinerary to shape new business concepts into real business solutions.
CHANGE IT: Enable transformation to stand strong in the future
Most of your business processes are probably working well, but there’s always that procedure or business unit that needs a fresh approach if you want to keep it strong in the future. Therefore, you need to rethink it in a fundamental way, quick-fixing is not enough. In that case, the blue path is your perfect space for action – it will help you envision a different future for the company. Working in blue, leaders and their teams are encouraged to re-imagine the value they create more long term. Walking a blue itinerary towards enterprise excellence means committing to uncertainty since your focus here is on inventing – on dreaming up new approaches and conceiving the right procedures to achieve them.
Progress here is like a two-sided coin: One side is about exploring, about doing things differently than before, about learning and creating. The other side is about eliminating and forgetting, which can be profoundly disorienting in businesses, as it requires abandoning old paths to success. This shouldn’t be a hurtful, brutal-cut-procedure necessarily. Thanks to our 5-step approach, transformation will become a natural process that can be softly integrated in the company, with a guaranteed outcome. This organic new business routine will enable business leaders to more easily launch new business goals (1), to better synchronise and align with their teams (2), to purposely shape solutions (3), to optimize personal employee contribution (4) and to monitor and report on progress in an organized, more visual way (5).
STOP IT: Stop the wrong things to create more space for productivity
Choosing red as your entrance gate towards enterprise excellence means you are struggling with an issue that needs attention first. Is making progress hard in your organisation because you keep on tripping over the same stumbling blocks? Tackling persisting problems by the root is often the preliminary stage of better performance and innovation. It’s just a question of priorities. To focus on what’s going well, sometimes you need to lay your hands first on what’s not going so well.
Everything that’s draining your company’s profitability is on the radar here – from malfunctioning innovation processes to underperforming sales and customer care teams. Clearing these impediments is an incontestable condition for business stability and growth. Obvious as this may seem, it is anything but. Stopping red activities demands humility, reflection and special efforts. Many business leaders and their co-workers however continue investing time and energy in projects, products and/or people that - despite all the bells and the whistles - have lost every relevance, often without knowing. For some, toxic work even has become an addiction.
The goal of working in the red zone is exposing what currently undermines your business: all activities that generate negative value will be put under the looking glass. Once your ‘red’ activities are identified, you develop a remedying process, so you can concentrate on the projects that drive your enterprise forward.