Value creation

A lot has been written and said about Europe facing a need of more growth, innovation and less red tape and regulations. The same is true about the businesses we work in and about ourselves. We basically need to increase our value output. Outsourcing, offshoring, partnerships, upskilling and reskilling – tons of things have been done and continues to be invested in. At BeeyondX we have been in several discussions with different businesses about means and ways to create a higher degree of value creation in organizations and teams.   

Let us share our thoughts, if interested we would love to hear from you.

Gary Hamel back in his book The Future of Management (2007) talks about the pyramid of value creation. The hygiene elements (performing tasks assigned with diligence and competence) only take you so far. To create higher value, taking initiative, being creative and possessing a strong will to get things done is also needed, and how you differentiate yourself. Employees that show the later characteristics tend to be high performing and adding a much higher value to businesses. It can for example be the salesperson doing a great job in assessing the true needs of the customers and being able to translate them into actions, to a receptionist “owning” the customer experience of visitors to the place of his or her work. There are no problems finding examples of what differentiates someone “doing the job” to someone “outperforming the role expectations”.

Those best equipped to define how real value creation looks tend to be those responsible for the job to be done. We really appreciate the research of Zeynep Ton and her approach to what she refers to as the “Good Job Strategy”. Invite those doing the job to define how to evolve it. What can be cut out, added and adjusted.

So, what we are doing is with clients exploring how to increase expectations of functions and roles in their organizations. It is about challenging the actual role requirements, incentive structures and expectations of each other. But it is also with the teams involved that they define what can be standardized, automated and taken out.

There will not come a Eureka moment when someone finds The Recipe for how to build the next generation value creating organizations. But by leaning on relevant experience and research we can experiment and evolve how we run our businesses and do our part in creating a more competitive company.