![]() If every enterprise can be looked at as a technology business, then leaders of all stripes need to be competent from this perspective. Leaders can no longer abdicate technology considerations to the IT department. Your frontline experience 20 years ago with a now-defunct ERP/vendor is going to be of little help connecting the dots between “big picture” decisions to like migrating to the cloud or a program to drive AI/automation into operations. Technology is always changing (advancing) so it is vital for a leader in any domain to keep current at the macro and micro thought frame level. If someone can’t somehow connect the “big picture” strategic desire for change to “little picture” execution, they won’t succeed. A big part of the early execution phase of a project that I was leading was caught up with producing over 1,000 SOP’s so that the process scope could be transformed. In many transformation situations, you will find that standard operating procedures (SOP’s) or work instructions never been formally defined or written down although there is no shortage of knowledge, opinion, or oral traditions that have been the working basis for years. In the process domain, the lowest level is what an employee does to execute their job role. Are we transforming product development, supply chain, go-to-market, etc.? Which end-to-end processes are impacted? Once there has been alignment on the “big picture”, work needs to be done at the “little picture” level to build it from the ground up. But unless a leader can pivot to execution at the micro-level, the value potential of that macro-level idea will not be realized.ĭefining process scope for strategic change is an important decision in the high-level design of any future-state operating model. It might be a great strategic idea to change the way that an enterprise’s people are organized. I experienced this level-of-abstraction whiplash when I found myself writing/defining individual job profiles that were needed to staff a centralized business services center that came out of a “big picture” strategy to drive scale and efficiency that I had gotten senior executives to approve. Once these macro-decisions are made, the work to build (actually, a re-build with transformation) that vision needs to be executed at the micro-level. Strategic transformations often imagine different ways to organize people as part of a new way of operating – decentralized to centralized, regional to global, functional silos to process orientation, generalist roles to subject-matter-experts, etc. Remembering (experience) and staying current on how things work (lifelong learning) at the frontlines of work enables you to lead successful execution of “big picture” strategic changes that you’re now responsible for driving. Early in our careers, we generally work on executing micro-level activities and then develop by taking on larger responsibilities that begin to move up in scale and level-of-abstraction. It is therefore important to understand the macro/micro thought-frames around people, process, and technology in the context of a commercial enterprise. This requires starting with an attractive “big picture” future-state and working backwards to disaggregate that target operating model into the “little picture” requirements needed to build it. Transformation in an enterprise involves imagining a new/better way of doing things and then implementing that vision by building new capability (people, process, and technology) to make it a reality. Understanding that results on the P&L are directly related to the product pricing process gives a business leader the ability to address profitability issues by knowing which underlying process needs to be modified. As an example of these two thought-frames, the microeconomic activity of setting the price of each individual product impacts an enterprise’s profit and loss statement when aggregated with all other products in a company’s portfolio. This big picture/little picture way of thinking is invaluable to any leader in the enterprise, especially those driving transformation. Macroeconomics is just the sum of all the microeconomic activity occurring in the market, but it is helpful to learn them separately first, then make the connections so one can be knowledgeable, no matter where you find yourself operating within this continuum. In my Economics education, the curriculum was divided between courses that schooled me in how market phenomena worked at an individual level (microeconomics) and those that taught how to think about the aggregate, system-level forces in the economy (microeconomics).
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