How do banks switch customer relationships from branch offices to mobile phone screens? Why is one multinational consumer goods company organized by category, while another organizes by region? Why is one insurance company deep into an agile transformation while another is experimenting with it only at the edges of its business?
Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?
For every company wrestling with evolutions in its strategy, success depends as much on matching the operating model to those evolutions as it does on the soundness of the strategy itself. Your operating model must define ways of working and behaviors that actually bring your company’s strategy to life. If your company’s promise to its customer is lowest costs, is everyone focused on cost control? If your reputation is built on superb service, is everyone — not just the front line, but even back-office functions like accounting or legal or procurement —highly attuned to how they affect the customer experience? What high-performance behaviors are nonnegotiable, and how do you make sure that you’re enabling and reinforcing them? What is your approach to risk taking, experimentation, and test and learn? And finally, does the operating model support the company’s strategic mission with the right combination of people, process, technology, and tools?