Beautifully summarised and as you know, much
easier to describe than to get done.

Grant’s point on culture is confirmed by a recent
Harvard Business School Survey,that showed a majority
of U.S. based enterprises were run according to the preferences of the senior executive group.

Changing those preferences makes the courage and stamina of
spawning salmon,seem relatively ordinary

Again, another great post and vision. Yes!

The 9th Key make me remember the Constraints Theory, from Goldratt. It is perfect and fundamental, besides all other keys.

Cheers,
Mario

This assumes that the owners/directors/managers of an enterprise have a realistic grasp of running a business which has not always been the case.

You say that “The first principle… is a crystal clear understanding of the business itself”. But in my experience, few senior management teams have any clear, self-consistent understanding of their business. So which comes first, our choice of business outcomes or our choice of customers? Is it best to choose the kind of customers and customer needs which we want to address? Or better to decide upon the nature of our organisation and business strategy, and then find a market and customer base?

Personally, I don’t think you can separate these questions… you have to resolve all the issues, and we can start by identifying all our expected stakeholders and understand the various values they expect.

Once we understand what we and our stakeholders mean by ‘value’, we have some chance of envisioning a desired outcome, identifying the firm’s ‘True North’ and establishing strategic goals. And some chance of aligning activities, including IT/IS investments, with the ‘True North’ direction.

Your 2nd point concerns culture. I agree that is important. But I believe culture is a result of the behaviour of the senior decision makers. If they are reactive, rather than proactive, or base decisions on opinions rather than facts & evidence, then the workforce will follow suite. The firm’s culture has to be nurtured and modified to be proactive, innovative, ambitious, constantly improving, fact-driven… and to align with the stakeholders’ value perspectives and demands. Developing the firm’s culture is one of senior management’s crucial tasks, best achieved by example. We don’t have to take culture as a given.

If senior management does develop and support a culture of continuous improvement (and only they can do so) then it is feasible to systematically increase the capacity to deliver value for less waste (while avoiding over-commitment). Dr. Taiichi Ohno is famous for consistently ‘rewarding’ the achievement of process performance goals by removing 10% of a group’s resources, and challenging them to sustain production volumes and quality as before. He didn’t say how, just suggested what. Invariably, the group found sufficient waste that could be removed to meet Ohno’s demand.

My point is, you don’t need to build waste into your value stream in order to avoid over-commitment. But you do need an expert engineering workshop, focused on delivering customer value & new know-how, and capable of responsibility-based planning.

Best regards,
Grant Rule
MD, Software Measurement Services Ltd.