| | By Mick James
It’s been a while
since we spoke to The
Office for Business
Architecture (OBA). OBA
is founded on a
passionate belief that
“the answer is out
there”, its novel
approach to consultancy
being to find companies
with problems and
network them with other
organisations that have
already encountered and
solved the same problem.
After nearly three
years the firm has built
up a formidable network
of clients, and is now
trying to formalise some
of the lessons learned
from their successes.
“Of all these
hundreds of companies,
many of the
conversations have been
about supply chain,”
says Bill Bronsky,
founder and managing
director of OBA. “We
wanted to find out
whether it was something
in their DNA which made
them successful. Can you
find it, is it
translatable?”
In a joint research
project with the London | |
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| | Business School, OBA
researched over 140
mainly Fortune 500
companies to see what
lay behind supply chain
success – or mediocrity.
The research examined a
number of potential
success factors:
strategy, governance, IT
and capability. The
results are startling,
with implications which
reach far beyond supply
chain issues.
The first finding was
that IT was little more
than an enabler.
“Every time we do a
survey, despite
companies spending
millions on IT systems,
we find there is nothing
special about the IT
used by the top
companies,” says
Bronsky. “Their priority
is the system, which is
often very simple. In
some cases a bespoke
system that just works
very well – not the
all-singing, all-dancing
ERP systems.”
In contrast, the top
companies invest very
heavily in their people
– building their skills
and capability through | |
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| | training and development
programmes.
“The top five or six
companies were spending
five or six weeks a year
training and building
their people,” says
Bronsky. “That’s more
than twice the amount of
time that other people
spent.”
The other big lesson,
says Bronsky, is
integration. “These
companies also
understand when to stop
building their
capability at the
expense of making sure
that all the different
functions are
integrated, so that
there is alignment
between procurement,
supply chain, customer
service and so on.”
The message comes
across loud and clear:
winning organisations
are built on a solid
foundation of people.
“The more I talk
about it, the simpler it
gets,” says Bronsky.
“There’s one big, clear
thing that sticks out
about the best
performing companies. In | |
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| | every case there is a
very strong identifiable
culture of some sort.
You might not agree with
it, but you can put your
finger on it and it’s
absolutely clear what
the culture is: this is
how we do things.”
This state of affairs
can’t be reached via a
six-month programme.
“Hundreds of times
you see cases where the
issue is some sort of
disconnect between the
cultures, a misalignment
which people try to
address by KPIs or some
other measure,” says
Bronsky. “But it needs
to be much more
comprehensive than that,
and very specific to
that organisation. A lot
of consultancy companies
focus on systems and
processes, but you need
to focus less on
changing the
organisation and more on
changing how people
feel, how they integrate
with each other.”
The answer, according
to Bronsky, is simply to
expose people to the
ones that are getting it
right.
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“They need to hear it
directly from them, they
need to hear and see
what that person is
like, to see how it
works. Get people to
‘infect’ the
organisation – that
sounds bad but sometimes
laughter is infectious.”
I believe that OBA
has discovered something
very profound here,
which speaks to some of
my deepest intuitions
about organisations and
change – namely that if
you have the right
people and the right
culture, most other
things will resolve
themselves. Also that
people are deeply
attracted to those kinds
of workplaces and want
to either emulate them
or work there.
Organisations that
invest in their people
have futures.
At a moment when a
thousand knives are
poised over training and
development budgets, and
everything else “soft”
in organisations, it’s a
message that can’t come
a moment too soon. | |
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