Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel

146 Pages·2014·8.68 MB·English

by  Laurent Chevreux

Chevreux
Plaizier
Schuh
Brown
Triplat
What do The Beatles, Apollo 13, the Roman military, a herd of orcas, and the very
best companies in the world all have in common? Answer: Plasticity. They can
change, adapt and excel as the situation requires.
In most organizations, strategy and functional excellence get the most atten-
tion. But even the best of either provides only limited long-term advantage. Highly
effective organizations add Plasticity as a third dimension and rack up stellar break-
throughs—again and again. It is the key ingredient that allows strategy and func-
tional excellence to deliver value.
As the authors show in Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel,
Plasticity also enables great organizations to break down barriers and collaborate
in the pursuit of a common objective, and to reconfigure or rewire themselves to
face down challenges or reach ever-stronger competitive positions.
Through entertaining stories and astute analysis, this book demonstrates that
Plasticity spurs sports teams to become champions, companies to book record
earnings, and artists to attain worldwide fame. You can use its principles—adapt-
ability, flexibility, fluid networks and roles, lofty goals, and innovation, among oth-
ers—to achieve operational excellence, tear down silos, and create more vibrant,
creative enterprises. Your organization can become not just highly profitable and
fun to work for, but an organization that can change the world.
Plasticity allows an organization to choose its own destiny, become versatile,
and dare more than others. Its success lies in a set of abilities called the Magic 7:
• Purpose: Your company must discover, select, and express what it is meant for.
• Focus: Your company must have the courage to ignore everything that is not in line with its
purpose, and then see that purpose through.
• Culture: Your company must create the conditions that allow people to work across boundaries
and outside of predefined roles.
• Spirit: Your company must inspire people to feel part of a cause that is bigger than they are.
• Network: Your company must provide the means, freedom, and encouragement
for people to nurture and grow their internal and external networks continuously.
• Knowledge: Your company must encourage experts to provide their knowledge and make it
readily available to everyone who needs it.
• Leadership: Your company's leaders must model and personify the characteristics they want
others to adopt.
Silo thinking? Poor collaboration? Weak earnings? Strategies that gain no traction?
Corporate Plasticity: How to Change, Adapt, and Excel is the answer. It shows you how
to cultivate each of the seven disciplines to infuse Plasticity in an organization. That—
along with razor-sharp strategy and crisp execution—will unleash the power you need
to reach both personal and corporate goals. You might even change the world.
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Contents
about the authors                               vii
part 1: the Corporate plasticity Manifesto      1
the Starting point                                3
a postmortem on Classic Management Science       7
the third dimension                            12
does plasticity Solve It all?                       30
part 2: plasticity at play                  31
Come together: did the Beatles deploy plasticity?   33
the Miracle on Ice                               39
d-day                                         43
Steam locomotives                             47
teleonomy                                     51
arcimboldo                                    53
golden Ratio                                   55
Communication of ants                          59
public Spaces                                   61
the Human Brain                               65
the Roman Military                             69
Rugby                                         73
wikipedia                                      77
oakland athletics                               81
nato Forces                                   85
Kodak                                         87
the european Union                             91
the Conservation Biologist Facing Synthetic Biology  95
guns, germs, and Steel                           99
pack of wolves                                101
vi Contents
orcas                                        103
Symphony orchestra                           107
actor and director                             109
Humans                                      111
purpose                                       115
Focus                                         117
Culture                                       121
Spirit                                         123
network                                      125
Knowledge                                    127
leadership                                    129
part 3: the way Forward                133
Case Studies                                   135
Case Study 1: Changi airport                    137
Case Study 2: Spacex                           141
Case Study 3: din tai Fung                      145
Index                                         149
Part 1:
The Corporate Plasticity Manifesto
The Starting Point
For decades, executives have driven improvement along two
dimensions: corporate strategy and functional excellence. And
despite the many well-intentioned attempts to make manage-
ment a reliable science, the outcomes have been mixed.
Corporate history is full of counterintuitive case examples
and mysteries that management science fails to comprehend
or explain. Why, for example, does one leader in the photo-
graphic film and paper industry nearly cease to exist while the
other transforms into an imaging company and thrives in the
digital world? Why does one carmaker successfully introduce
a platform strategy while another fails miserably? How was
a maker of rubber boots capable of dominating the mobile
phone industry for decades? How does a PC maker emerge
from near bankruptcy only to enter and totally transform the
mature mobile phone industry as well as six other industries?
Also, as a long-term view on the S&P 500 would suggest, does
growth make companies ultimately so complex and inflexible
that they are destined to fail in the end? Is it all about luck
and coincidence?

Corporate Plasticity 5
We don’t think so. In our view, management science so far has
overlooked a third dimension that is complementary to cor-
porate strategy and functional excellence. We call this dimen-
sion Corporate Plasticity. The definition of Corporate Plasticity
is twofold. It is
1. The ability of individual agents to collabo-
rate in the pursuit of a common objective.
2. The ability of individual agents to recon-
figure themselves to face a so far unknown
challenge or reach a new state.
Surprisingly enough, Plasticity is everywhere. In nature, it allows
a pack of wolves to hunt and kill prey that is several times
heavier than a single wolf. In space, it brought the Apollo 13
astronauts back safely. In World War II, it let the Allied naval, land,
and air forces overrun the highly fortified German defenses in
Normandy. Plasticity is at the core of the human race and has
allowed our species to conquer and reshape the entire planet.
Absence of Plasticity—even when possessing superior strat-
egy and capabilities—is a certain recipe for failure. The Roman
legion, after having conquered most of the then-known world,
experienced it when they were defeated by Germanic tribes
that were superior in neither strategy nor capability but played
by different rules. At the 1980 Winter Olympics, the USSR
had the best ice hockey team in the world. They had won the
gold medal every year since 1964 and had the highest-scoring
players, the strongest defense, and the most reliable goalten-
der. But they didn’t win. They were defeated in a medal-round
game by a US team made up of amateur and collegiate players,
who then went on to win the gold medal. Although Plasticity
seems to be a winning formula just about anywhere you look,
it has largely been ignored in business—until now.
When Plasticity meets functional excellence, a collection of
great individual performances can turn into a grand master-
piece. Think of a symphony. The orchestra is composed of
highly talented musicians who, over time, with practice and
experience, could perform without a conductor. Yet like a
great CEO, the conductor does not control the orchestra; he
6 The Starting Point
or she, rather, influences and guides the orchestra toward a
perfection they could not achieve on their own.
When Plasticity meets strategy, the results are highly creative
and sometimes surprising. Think of a jam session. The jazz
musicians start off on a theme, and then they improvise. They
react to what their peers are doing, carrying the theme into
another iteration.
In business, the combination of functional excellence and
Plasticity will enable companies to achieve true operational
excellence. Plasticity will tear down the organizational and
cultural boundaries between silos and create more vibrant,
more stimulating workplaces.
Plasticity also makes a company continually rethink what it
stands for and enables it to adapt its strategy to turbulent envi-
ronments and create a competitive advantage. With Plasticity,
the makers of steam engines in the 19th century would not have
ceased to exist but would have evolved into propulsion compa-
nies, mastering diesel and electricity just as well as steam.
In our view, we are about to enter the era of Plasticity in
business. It will largely shape competition in the decades to
come. Strategies have become wholesale commodities, and
functional excellence ultimately will not make the difference.
Leading companies are already finding it increasingly difficult
to make incremental gains in functional excellence. Emerging
market competitors are quickly replicating excellence in engi-
neering, procurement, manufacturing, and sales and marketing.
A couple of years from now, it will be normal for companies—
at least those that embrace the challenge—to find a sound
balance between strategy, functional excellence, and Plasticity.
Corporate Plasticity 7
A Postmortem on Classic Management
Science
Classic management science has been central to the modern
corporation. Functional excellence and corporate strategies have
enabled massive increases in productivity. Such advancements
have lowered costs, prices, and barriers to entry, and they have
created organizations with efficient functions and clear direction.
But not everything that has emerged is marvelous. The mod-
ern organization has inherent problems. These include silo
thinking as well as a fixation on detail rather than on the big
picture. Worse, beautiful and supposedly flawless corporate
strategies fail. This has led to a deluge of theories for rectify-
ing the issues by developing even better processes and more
immaculate strategies.
Of course, having superior processes and better strategies
than competitors is important. But has anyone considered
whether the ills of the modern organization or the regular
failures of strategy have the same root causes? And as a conse-
quence, have we become too transfixed on managem ent theo-
ries that began before the modern firm was even envisioned?
On its own, can classic management science help resolve the
new complexities emerging in modern organizations?
The Birth and Nurturing of Functional
Excellence and Strategy
To consider if classic management science answers today’s cor-
porate questions, we must understand what gave rise to its devel-
opment in the first place. In other words, what problems and
challenges was classic management science seeking to resolve?
Only by understanding the original intent behind functional excel-
lence and corporate strategy can we begin to consider whether
they are still suitable for solving today’s problems.