Smart Organizations: The Buck Stops with the Executives

In continuation of my analysis of smart organizations, I have since discovered the importance of leadership. The leadership defines the direction the organization goes. Great organizations are known to have great leaders. They define the direction and determine what is important, the culture and the future of their domain.

Until the leadership of an organization knows the benefits of creating an efficient system and work towards it, efforts by the underlings would never amount to anything. Sometimes it is easy to go for strategic meetings (very boring meetings!), create policy documents but until words can be matched with action, nothing comes out of it.Smartness and the desire to be efficient is not enough to create a smart workplace, it must be a defined Organizational culture. It drives better than policy frameworks. Culture taps into the emotional fundamentals. Do you think people are crazy about Apple products because they are the best? No! They create good products but the culture and the hype (Reality Distortion Field) drives the buzz! In Nigeria, you can easily know bankers that work with old generation banks from new generation banks by the culture, the drive to excel, the aggressiveness, the can-do attitude. This is what the leadership needs to create  an attitude of wanting to be the best; not only in the market, but in how things are done. In being the smartest organization!

Why wouldnt the leadership of an organization create an efficient environment? Are they clueless or too busy to focus on the fundamentals?

Most of the current executives are not young enough and could have missed out of the smart revolutions that the internet and new technologies have introduced. Many of them went to prestigious schools such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc for MBAs but the impact of that on revolutionary ideas has not been felt in majority of these organizations. Would things get better when the new crops of young executives start to take over or would they also have missed out on the new waves that would be defining how businesses are run in a few years?

The Nigerian economic space is developing fast, with the financial services sector on the forefront. By the end of the year when all financial organizations would have the same year end; new avenues must be exploited for growth in an insanely competitive space. While excellent marketing skills would bring in required growth in assets, smartness of the organization would determine the profit that can be eked out.

What makes a smart organization

Of recent, I have been thinking deeply about what makes an organization to be smart. Or deeper still, what defines a smart organization. I am thinking about real life attributes not some fancy buzz words from smart pants consultants.

If someone should ask me, I would say a smart organization is one that reacts quickly to market changes, whose components (resources, employees) are used in the most cost effective manner delivering above average return on investment. So a lot must be expected from each organizational unit. Assets must be deployed in the most cost effective manner and results must be squeezed out. These are just rambling thoughts but one day, I will come around to codify it.

Why should we have smart organizations? My own answer is so simply stupid: It makes employees happy! From my little life experiences, the workers are the first to get stressed up when things don’t go smoothly. Like some people I know will say, they willl “Fi eje se!” (use blood to run it!). If things can run faster, better, more efficiently with less input and more time to either party away (Friday night is sacrosanct) and do better things, I should be less stressed up.

Let me swap my phone OS!

Going back the computer memory lane, I can state categorically that the success that the PC had in changing the world (the PC really changed the world) is mostly due to the flexibility and interchangeability of its different components. That kudos belongs to the IBM guys who, surmounting all obstacles, brought out the IBM PC and its standards all within 1 calendar year.

I love Apple products, and they definitely started before the PC but their closed approach to the PC thingy is frustrating and stifles progress including theirs.

Where is my rambling taking me to? Not too far. The mobile phones of these days are much more powerful than PCs of not too far ago. In fact, I believe that sometimes in the near future, there would be a convergence where mobiles would be the PCs. Don’t laugh at me; computers before the PCs were as big as trucks!

However, the mobile guys are following the same route of Apple. They are semi-open and have APIs for guys like me (did I say me?) can write our applications on them. These phones run OSes from Microsoft, Symbian, etc but these OSes are so coupled/glued to the hardware that is it almost impossible to replace it with something else. In the PC world, I can have Linux, UNIX, Windows (and its flavors) running on just any PC happily as long as I can get the drivers. I can even get them to dual-boot! Why can’t I have same on my phones?

I had a Nokia E70. A beautiful phone albeit so slow you would end up smashing it up. I just thought why can’t I dump the Nokia idiotic OS and put in say a Linux?

Google is doing Android, an open platform which would solve some bits of these madness but what I dream about is when there can be 100% interchangeability of phones and the OS running them.