Transforming Organizations as Living
Systems:
Optimizing Organizational Performance and Value Creation
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Abstract:
Restoring growth and value are top priorities. Organizations are
striving to increase productivity and improve operating results as they
respond to urgent performance demands and turbulent market conditions.
New organizational capabilities, greater effectiveness, and transformed
costs of coordination are critical needs. There’s no time for
unproductive fads. Organizations are challenged to meet “back-to-value”
operating requirements while simultaneously preparing for emerging frontiers
of competition. These are two tough challenges.
All organizations are living systems. Sustained improvements in
operating capabilities require attention to multi-dimensional dynamics.
Mechanistic efforts to optimize intangible asset value drivers are unproductive,
with human capital, knowledge capital, and social capital as prominent
examples. The keys to superior operating performance and value creation
reside in the behaviors and interactions occurring naturally in organizational
social systems.
No physical system in any organization creates value absent its social
system. The capabilities that drive operating performance reside
within these social systems --- encompassing networks and communities
--- in our organizations. They live within our work practices and
behaviors. They express themselves in interactions, transactions
and decisions with our customers, suppliers and partners as participants
in broader ecosystems. Our challenge is to optimize the performance
of these social systems and interactions.
Organizations need to sense and optimize dynamics of learning and knowledge
that are fundamental to these interactions. For example, dynamics
of “content, context and community” enabled by “conversations”
are the conduits through which knowledge flows, is exchanged, and converted
to value. These “C4” dynamics occur naturally in work
practices. Organizational conventions, in the form of policies,
processes, practices and structures, along with technologies can optimize
--- or impede --- their effectiveness.
All organizations are challenged to shed their industrial era constraints
and presumptions. Does anyone still believe that prescriptions for
task segmentation or hierarchical "command and control" contribute
to the agility required for superior performance in 21st century markets?
Unfortunately, our organizational behaviors remain captive to these presumptions
and continue to be reinforced by them daily. We need more than incremental
improvements. We need to re-examine our fundamental premises for
optimizing operating performance and value creation and put new ones into
play. True transformation is truly our greatest contemporary challenge.
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Biography
Jeff Kelley's work as a co-founder of Transform Partners and managing principal
of CapitalWorks, LLC focuses on optimizing the value of organizational knowing
and knowledge. The flows and exchanges of knowledge occurring naturally through
work practices drive operating performance in all organizations. As value drivers,
these interactions are primary contributors to sustained high performance and
value creation. Jeff applies principles of inductive analytics, retention economics,
industrial ecology, value-based management, systems dynamics and generative learning
in working with his colleagues to apply innovative methods for assessing and optimizing
value driver performance. He works with organizations to enhance their strategic
effectiveness, improve operating performance, and increase shareholder value.
His line management experience encompasses international wholesale banking,
service operations, product marketing and sales, product research and development,
corporate finance, legal affairs, product licensing, corporate planning, offshore
software development, and program development and management. Jeff has expertise
in systems architecture, software design and development, finance, management,
applied research, and consulting. Over the past twenty-five years he has led
change programs in which organizations were transformed into high quality, high
productivity market leaders generating substantial business growth, increased
net operating margins and superior returns on capital.
Jeff manages diverse client engagements globally, including projects for international
financial services, digital home shopping, multi-client research, and organizational
transformations. His client management responsibilities include relationships
with Global 2000 market leaders, U.S. Government departments and agencies, consultancy
firms and research organizations. He holds an A.B. degree (magna cum laude)
from Boston College in History and English.
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