Whole Enterprise

Businesses are often sitting on a mine of untouched resources and capabilities. This potential for dynamic performance and far-reaching benefits is revealed, not by redoubling focus on the individual components of the business, but by optimally connecting and communicating between all these components.

In nature, the health of a complex system arises from a symphony of harmonized interactions. This is true with the chemical and tissue systems within a single organism, and in the symbiotic relationships of an entire ecosystem of creatures. The same is also true in business: the most effective companies successfully tune together all areas of their enterprise to produce a harmony that both resounds in all they do internally and sounds remarkable to their market.

Whole Enterprise presents a broad view of a healthy enterprise. All components and activities are integrated in a comprehensive, balanced approach to finding, connecting, and leveraging a full spectrum of assets to fulfill responsbilities and produce results. It is useful for high-level planning and evaluation, and ensures practical outcomes that align with your direction and mission in conjunction with the rhythm of 3D Enterprise Development.

Whole Enterprise

Because business is complex, activities, resources, and roles must be divided into managable units. But these components are interdependent parts of a dynamic whole. Each area of business offers a specific contribution and makes specific demands. Weakness in any one area can restrict performance of the entire entity, but wholistic health allows optimal potential to emerge.

Whole Enterprise: Strategy and Culture form the Leadership axis and spine that supports and connects all the other areas of the business. Business areas work together in pairs: Operations and Marketing build Production, Finance and Governance promote Responsibility, and Information and People foster Attention.

Strategy
Direction

Strategy sets direction for a company by comprehending and responding to the internal and external realities of the enterprise. This begins with developing clarity about the unfolding story and how it should be steered by the available assets to create an optimal trajectory, engaging all the players and the landscape as it moves through the environment.

CORE TASKS

Story Clarification

Experiences | Realities

Asset Inventory

Resources | Energies

Environment Survey

Players | Landscape

Above. Recurring core tasks are listed in bold. These tasks represent the application of the 3D Development cycle to the Whole Enterprise matrix, the first task being Source-centric, the second Spin-centric, and the third Drive-centric. Underneath, key elements managed by each task are listed.

Culture
Identity

Almost everything that involves people develops a culture of its own. A healthy business takes an active role in the evolution of its own and that of its market. Intentional work in the area of Culture produces shared identity by articulating a purpose larger than the company and community, by crafting practices that differentiate and describe what the business means and values, and by encoding purposes and practicies into messages that are experienced by the participants in the business and in the market.

CORE TASKS

Purpose

Mission | Vision

Practices

Methods | Principles

Messages

Symbols | Experiences

Operations
Faithful Delivery

As globalization and the Digital Revolution multiply competitors for almost every business, "how a company does" is just as important as "what a company does". The key to winning and retaining customers in such a noisy market is faithful delivery through optimized operations. For both service and product companies, this begins by perfecting the supply of materials and labor and prefecting the systems of production to create a remarkable offering.

CORE TASKS

Supply

Materials | Labor

Systems

Processing | Monitoring

Offering

Product | Service

Marketing
Reciprocal Relationships

Trust is the true currency of business. It is created by developing reciprocal relationships where audiences share value back and forth with the business that serves them. These relationships always begin with interactions that build awareness and offer opportunities for trial, then they build relevance and affinity through delievery of an offering that manifests the company's market positioning, and finally they maximize participation when loyatly and advocacy become natural.

CORE TASKS

Interaction

Awareness | Trial

Positioning

Relevance | Affinity

Participation

Loyalty | Advocacy

Finance
Optimized Opportunity

Since money symbolizes all the real and potential value of your business, tracking and managing it appropriately is an important component of readying it to respond to opportunity. The process begins by gathering and interpreting data about sources and uses of funds to develop a picture of how value is being managed. Accountability then does the work of matching these realities to the mission, situation, and needs of the company. This produces clarity and realistic readiness needed when planning how to exert leverage towards the advancement of the enterprise.

CORE TASKS

Analysis

Records | Trends

Accountability

Diligence | Reconciliation

Responsiveness

Investment | Risk Management

Governance
Authenticity

Whatever the relationship to your business – customer, employee, investor, vendor, community – trust is determined by one question: Do you follow-through on your promises and commitments? It's Governance's task to produce this authenticity by retaining the value of the company's property, meeting commitments to the law and the stakeholders, and protecting all constituents.

CORE TASKS

Property

Real | Intellectual

Responsibility

Compliance | Government

Protection

Company | Community

Information
Actionable Information

The knowledge resources of a business only have value if information is actionable – if it is available and useful whenever its needed. This requires excellent processes that gather data from across-the-board activities of the company, translate that information into something meaningful and helpful for the actors, and disseminate this actionable information to those who will need it when they need it.

CORE TASKS

Gathering

Capture | Storage

Translation

Interpretation | Measurement

Dissemination

Publishing | Accessibility

People
Full Engagement

Since a business is limited to the strengths and energies of its people, success depends on the full engagement of everyone toward the enterprise mission. Motivated people are activated to perform at higher levels with better results, and efforts to maintain their wholeness ensures they can and will continue in productivity while benefiting more from their work.

CORE TASKS

Activation

Ispiration | Capacity

Performance

Alignment | Accountability

Wholeness

Nurture | Integration

Relatedness

3 Values for Business Integrity

Organizations work best when all they do arises from, and is infused with, effective Strategic and Cultural Leadership. This provides the direction and identity that keeps the company on course at both the macro and micro levels, and both attracts people to your mission and accelerates them towards its achievement.

When direction and identity are infused throughout an organization, three essentail realities emerge:

Comprehensiveness All areas, systems, and components are healthy and attentively monitored to ensure inputs are available when needed and outputs are on target.

Balance All elements, large and small, operate with appropriate emphasis, each working and growing with demands and outputs that are sustainable at the organizational level and beyond.

Integration The needs, activities, and outputs of every component are artfully synchronized and connected to maximize resources, minimize waste, support health, and maximize results.

Leadership

leadership

Direction and identity evolve as a company grows in its particular environment. While leaders develop these intentionally, they are never completely defined internally, nor should they be left exclusively to the whims of the market. The best approach to effective translation of direction and identity is organic. It treats strategic and cultural leadership as a seed, carrying the essential DNA of the company and core "starter resources". This seed must be planted in every area of work where it can sprout and grow, taking shape and flavor from its context as it blossoms and produces fruit. This requires constant Strategic and Cultural conversations, both at the high-level in review of the company as a whole, and in each component as the initiator of any unit of work.

Inward/Outward

sc_center

Areas of enterprise work in pairs towards a common organizational objective, maintaining balance with one inward and one outward focus. As in most huaman activity, stability is possible through consistent motion, so each areas' inward or outward force produces "spin", promoting health through conversation around creative and collaborative tensions. Direction and identity form the axis at the center of the conversation, supporting the organization as a whole. As this output of Strategy and Culture moves downward, it produces a "center of gavity" for each area, functioning as the spine of the company's nervous system – the root support for movement and central conduit for awareness, sensation, and responsiveness.

Production

production

Example: As Marketing considers the launch of a new product, the question is how to locate this new offering relative to current positioning. The larger the gap between the potential market and the company's current position, the more tempting it is to crank up the volume on the campaign. However, every promise made must be vetted by Operations to make sure the company doesn't over-promise and under-deliver, damaging their current position with hype. Marketing and Operations should make these decisions in the context of the company direction and identity (Strategy and Culture), keeping responsiveness and reputation in balance.

But, this balance isn't just a throttle-limiter on Marketing. Operations needs Marketing's vision as a driver – measuring and imagining the opportunity to plan for scale and motivate production. Operations can also play a collaborative role: the current customer service stream can provide data on a "bridge segment" that is ready to try or buy the new offering, opening the new market without resorting to shouting.

Responsibilty

Example: R&D have presented a next-generation technology to the company board and legal team. Governance asks Finance for a review of the business model. Finance worries that the profit margin might be reduced by the risks of such an edgy technology. In fact, the legal team mentions that a competitor has met litigation due to damages incurred by customers through misuse of a similar offering. At this point, Strategy is asked "Are we the ones who should do this?" and Culture is asked "How do we meet this kind of opportunity and risk?". It's decided that scrapping the product and waiting for a competitor to make the jump ahead isn't an option. So Governance works with Finance to include money in the model for the company's capacity-building Culture to aggressively educate users, avoiding dangerous misuse of the product while saving the extreme costs of law suits. This preventative approach is better for customers and enhances the company-client relationships by adding value and increasing face-time.

Attention

Example: Strategy in a service company would like to use data from current customers in an environment survey, but the data set that Information has on hand is incomplete at best. The issue lies with the complex software the company uses to capture client data from each interaction. It takes time and effort both to learn the software and enter the data. In recent years, the company has focused on building a service force with soft skills in sales and client relationships (People). These workers say that staying engaged with customers keeps them busy, and they don't want to take their attention away from clients. The company decides it doesn't want to alter this service-emphasis in the company Culture, so Information suggests a suite of strategies to streamline data entry and automate record keeping. Trainers in the People area develop a new component to emphasize how good data practices is a way of taking care of clients over the long-term.

Health

Indicators of Health

Whole Enterprise provides a context for measuring enterprise strength in three key ways, especially as it relates to how well components of the company are working together to produce results.

Performance
Quantitative business measures indicate health over the long-term by revealing trends in retrospect. This monitoring over time gives insight that can be crafted into models and used to perfect processes and systems. Though lagging indicators, "the numbers" confirm each component's vitals and show effective coordination between business areas.

Activity & Environment
Qualitative indicators embedded in the company's activity and environment serve as coincidental indicators, providing clarity about what's happening in real time when gathered across all business areas. When the view of reality is too narrow, attention can be limited to a few urgent activities or environmental phenomenon and this could drive the company into a reactionary position or haphazard responsiveness.

Simplicity of Focus
Complexity can abound in business, but if it dominates thinking and action, it creates a haphazard, chaotic company and environment. When Strategy and Culture direct and authenticate inputs and outputs in every area, clarity is achieved, resolving the tug-of-war over urgent and competing opportunities and demands.

Uses

Applications

Whole Enterprise serves applications that require a high-level view of the relationships between aspects of a business and it's work in organizations of any size:

Connecting Workflows

Harmonize the inputs and outputs that link each area of your enterprise, mediated by the your unique Strategy and Culture.

Cross Training

Increase all-around fitness by combining people and elements from diverse areas in projects, evaluations, and development.

Clarifying Priorities

Filter opportunites and demands through direction and identity in the context of the whole company and with consideration for each component and participant.

Comprehensive Development

Translate your Strategy and Culture into every activity and element of the company to ensure long-term alignment to your trajectory and character.

Role Definition/Development

Clarify facilitatory executive roles that connect enterprise areas to ensure direction and identity while more effectively dividing work according to specialization without sacrificing communication and cross-collaboration.

Organizational Architecture

Early-stage companies can lay a blueprint for effective launch and growth and established businesses can plan tuning and renovation initiatives, ensuring health and progress while protecting direction and identity from enslavement by maintenance and survival concerns.

Whole Enterprise

Relatedness

Health

Uses

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