“Today’s organization is designed
for the business of yesterday.”

CooperComm has identified the organization of the future – the relational enterprise. Nothing less than a complete transformation is going to be required to survive the forced change that has already begun.

How to get there is the focus of our consulting and training practices, and is the topic of our newest book to be published this Fall by AMACOM. The book’s Introduction section follows. Information on other aspects of implementing a relational enterprise can be accessed from the “books” menu on the left of the screen.

The Relational Enterprise:
Moving beyond CRM to maximize All your                 business relationships
(AMACOM, 2002)

Introduction

What an exciting time to be in business. Just as the first Model T assembly line kicked off a revolution in the way goods were produced, the development of e-business technology and a changing customer culture have created the need for radically different business structures. Consequently, managers across the entire organization have a full agenda of change awaiting them.

The list of new topics is nearly overwhelming: one-to-one marketing, permission selling, e-business, e-commerce, customer relationship management, partner relationship management, enterprise/extraprise relationship management, customer interaction centers, B2E, B2B, B2C, and P2P … to name a few. As a result, today nearly every organization is involved in some sort of significant change. There is no shortage of professional advice, and the bulk of it is on target. No matter what the job title, nobody’s plate is empty.

Then there are the old standby topics that haven’t necessarily been successful in many organizations: continuous quality improvement, business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning, rightsizing, downsizing, outsourcing, core competence, customer satisfaction, and so on. Just check the bookshelves for a list of what the experts thought organizations should be implementing in the 90’s and beyond.

Old or new, there is a major problem. Everyone is talking about what organizations should be doing differently, but no one is talking about what kind of organization it’s going to take to accomplish it. Many past programs were little more than fads that became one of Dilbert’s "dead woodchucks" due to the lack of corresponding organizational change.

This remains a problem. The traditional self-contained, departmentalized, hierarchical organization is still the standard. Its reporting structure dates back to the Roman army. Its mass production and specialization of labor processes are 75 to 100+ years old. Ebeneezer Scrooge, once he learned how to use a PC, could step into most modern organizations and manage their operational and accounting systems. He’d be cost conscious and great at downsizing workers. He would have a department, a boss, a title, a job description, and subordinates. He could point to himself on the organization chart, and have set lines of responsibility and authority. The only thing that might confuse him a bit is this e-business thing.

Simply put, today’s organization is designed for the business of yesterday.

The organization of the future is going to be a relational enterprise. This is a new organizational structure defined by the core organization plus all the related constituents that are involved in its business. Core terms such as employee, job, competitor, partner, etc., will take on brand new meanings. Alternative workforce capabilities that allow immediate resizing will be created. A totally new internal structure supported by emerging relational systems will be implemented. In all, the coming change will be dramatic and extreme.

Morphing to a relationship-driven organization requires simultaneous and equally dramatic changes in fundamental areas covered in the four parts of this book: structure, service processes, systems, and leadership. Think of these as four roof support posts of a building. Without any one post, the entire building is at risk. There are no partial solutions, no shortcuts. There is also no priority, no order of implementation. Nothing proceeds until all four posts are in place. Becoming a relational enterprise is an all-or-nothing transition that starts with basic organizational structure. Partial, single point solutions, i.e., suboptimization, may truly be "anti-synergism"—the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Also, some of the change agenda is not necessarily new. Many of what Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon has called "dead woodchuck" ideas are still valuable. The difference may be in the extent to which they are leveraged, or in the fact that they are properly implemented at all. Unfortunately, many organizations failed to fully realize the benefits of yesterday’s hot topic before moving on to one of today’s "must-do" initiatives. So we will revisit faded concepts such as reengineering and open-book management. Only this time we will see them in the modern light of workflow and analytics.