Today more than ever, CEO's, C-level executives, general managers, and business unit heads are faced with a need to significantly alter the very fabric of their enterprise. Sometimes a new merger, a significant acquisition, or an upheaval in the competitive or market landscape, might predicate this need. The introduction of disruptive innovation to your industry may threaten the viability of your familiar way of doing business and running your enterprise. There may by an external demand for significantly elevated performance, a major regulatory change, or perhaps the inevitable march towards globalization.

When faced with this call for a new era in the dynamics and performance of an enterprise, mere change, that is an improvement or adjustment to already existing elements of the enterprise, is not enough. Winning at the new game may require nothing short of a transformation: a new constitution of and existence for your enterprise.

This is Very Risky Business

While at times urgently necessary, this process of transforming an enterprise is very risky. Business lore is full of stories of such campaigns that have failed, or worst yet, caused a setback in the forward movement of the company. Enterprise Wide TransformationsSM almost always require many, large, critical initiatives to be executed simultaneously, without losing any altitude in current performance.

Maintaining even usual performance levels may be already taxing to the bandwidth and capacity of the challenged workforce and management. The additional demands of reviewing and reinventing key processes, technology, and workforce competencies risk exhausting the enterprise resources. And yet, as an executive, you often have no choice; even though the probability of success is too low for your standards, it is transform or face the dwindling existence of your company.

Why Do Most Transformations Fail?

Perhaps the biggest contributor to the risk of transformation campaigns is a view that relates to the enterprise like it is a fixed and linear organized entity where action A causes reaction B in a predictable and orderly fashion. An example of this might be the notion that unlimited resources, a good set of rewards, and clear instructions and commands will lead to effective execution; and this in turn, will transform the enterprise and significantly elevate its performance.

In fact, organizations are not linear, nor captured in one place; they emerge from the collective behavior of all the individuals in the company, each interacting and reacting independently and locally in response to local conditions and partial information.

Thus, in the previous example, different individuals in the work force are acting and reacting to a myriad of elements in the environment, which in turn creates a perspective filtered by their own individual frame of reference, their past experience, current mood, stress-level, and most recent skirmish with another functional area, their boss's latest management blunder, and pending deadlines.

In addition to these individual dynamics, the overriding context of an organization -- that highly influential, yet often hidden, backdrop of the past that includes beliefs, experiences, presuppositions, assumptions, and unwritten rules -- takes any resource, any reward, and any instruction and filters it to fit with the prevailing way of doing things. Thus very often the net result of additional resources, new rewards, and clear commands is insignificant or even negative.

What it Takes to Have an Effective Enterprise Wide Transformation

Effectively transforming any enterprise requires both the individuals of the enterprise and the organization as a whole to engage in a series of structured conversations that identify, unhook, and retire the influences of the past. Then and only then, when the domination of past based thinking, behavior, and perspectives are removed, can an enterprise have the possibility to transform.

An Insigniam Enterprise Wide Transformation has an overriding design perspective that is given by the whole of your enterprise, from the vision and intended future for your enterprise. Standing in a deep understanding of complex systems, we work with you to insure that the management, as well as the broader workforce, sees and relates to all the various critical projects and initiatives as being harmoniously in concert with the intended future for your organization. We greatly increase the probability of success with these initiatives using our tools and methodologies for Business Imperative Projects and Enterprise Critical Initiatives.

Our Enterprise Wide Transformation requires the direct involvement of the leaders of the enterprise and strong partnership with the Insigniam Performance team. Our consulting activities include, but are not limited to, the following critical elements:

It is not uncommon for our clients to ask us to also provide leadership to promote collaboration and breakthrough performance principles among several consulting entities that are each providing key expertise.

Insigniam's Enterprise Wide Transformation creates a clear distinction between changing an existing model (no matter how significantly) and creating an entirely new model. It will yield a new order of organization dynamics and performance in a very short period of time, yielding powerful, long-lasting results.

Enterprise Wide Transformation, Biologics Manufacturing - A failing ERP implementation and issues in FDA regulatory compliance revealed a biological company's inability to satisfy both required corrective action and business operation demands. By transforming the entire enterprise, the company exceeded the profitability goal by 13% while meeting FDA compliance requirements; reengineered over 23 quality systems; and implemented organization strategy and culture.

Enterprise Wide Transformation, Biotech - In order to meet an aggressive 5-year strategic plan, the Medical Affairs organization of a top tier biotech company redesigned and transformed its organization from traditional functional lines into four therapeutic business units. This was accomplished within the time period allotted for just the pilot. The company met or exceeded all of the objectives in its strategy plan.

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