Successfully transforming organizations –
the modern pentathlon for companies
„The trick is not to try and walk through walls, but to use your eyes to find the door.“ This is particularly true in the transformation of companies, where the most direct method of implementation is not necessarily the best way forward. High unemployment and frustrating discussions concerning shareholder value lead to the question of securing sustainability through a company’s commercial behavior. Action may often appear efficient in the context of transformation, but in the end effectiveness must be the focus of activities to provide new long term perspectives for a company and to strengthen its competitive position. Here the ability of the company to change becomes a core competence. To achieve this, the organization must train for a pentathlon: program and project management, process design, information and communications technology, organizational development, and change management and human resources.
The fact that companies have to change in order to survive in the medium to long term is not new. The examples of IBM in the early 1990s and Samsung more recently demonstrade this clearly. What is new is that the cycles of transformation are getting shorter due to market dynamics. Who would have thought on 17 April 2000, the day that T-Online went public, that less than five years later the merger with T-Com would be seen by the Deutsche Telekom concern as being essential to securing the long term future of both organizations?
Whereas major changes such as mergers, cost cutting programs and reorganizations used to be on the agenda perhaps only once a decade, no manager can now be certain that a newly defined organization is going to exist for the next ten years. In addition to this there are now often a number of change processes taking place within an organization in parallel. This can be seen in the example of DaimlerChrysler. In this example there is the establishment of the new S-class’s production lines and massive personnel cutbacks are being planned at the same time. The implementation of these two conflicting change processes in parallel is an example of what makes transformation complex in modern companies.
Putting the objective setting into action
Transformation is a continuous process which is intended to create or anticipate the future. The focus is the development and implementation of new concepts, customer-oriented processes, an organization or an innovative technology. In this way new competences are gained and competitive options accessed. For this to be achieved objectives must be set first which ensure the sustainability of the desired results and provide the basis for consistent business success. The long term, sometimes highly detailed, plans for putting these objectives into action, which were still regarded as standard just a few years ago, no longer fit the bill. Non-foreseeable and thus unplanned events can easily make every plan, however detailed, obsolete.
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