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Experienced digital leaders know that when it comes to agility versus stability, start-ups and large companies can learn a lot from each other.
Building a digital culture has emerged as a key challenge for companies looking to thrive in the modern business era. How to build and adapt that culture is an issue that both large and smaller businesses struggle with. In this podcast, Brian Gregg, a partner in McKinsey’s San Francisco office who leads our consumer digital-excellence initiative, explores this issue with some of Silicon Valley’s leaders.
Participating in this installment were David Lee, COO and CFO of Impossible Foods, an innovative developer of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants; Pavan Tapadia, chief product officer at Yammer, an internal social-networking service which is now part of Microsoft; and Dianne Esber, associate partner and brand leader at Digital McKinsey in San Francisco. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Discussions on digital: How large and small companies build a digital culture
Dianne Esber, associate partner and brand leader at Digital McKinsey in San Francisco: Tonight we’re going to explore culture in small companies and large ones and what they can learn from each other about agility versus stability. I hear all the time from the largest companies, “I want to become more agile, how do I do it?” Do we have to either solve for being agile, or solve for being stable or scalable?
David Lee, COO and CFO of Impossible Foods: It depends on whether you’re asking if leaders have to make that tradeoff, or companies. I don’t think leaders have to. At Best Buy [where David was SVP of corporate finance during the 2013 turnaround], when there was a change in leadership at the top, [CEO] Hubert Joly and [former CFO]
Sharon McCollam exhibited this uncanny combination of being extremely fast while putting in place something that would endure as one of the better turnarounds in retail. I think they tripled the stock price. Great leaders don’t make that tradeoff. I would say that companies do, but not in a homogenous way.
If you’re a start-up, you don’t have a choice. You have to be agile, because you have to create something that’s never been seen before. But as you scale, it’s critical to put the foundation in place in finance or in risk management in order to create reliability and repeatability.
Pavan Tapadia, chief product officer at Yammer, now part of Microsoft: I think there are real tradeoffs. Small companies are agile, but it’s unplanned agility, because there’s a lack of process or a lack of thoughtful agility. In every element of your business there are tradeoffs between stability and agility. You need to identify which elements need to change frequently and which elements are the structure to support that change.
Dianne Esber: Are there any processes that could never be anything but agile, because they’re so core to the business?
Pavan Tapadia: There are things that should always be agile. But at big companies, because of scale, it often becomes hard to maintain that agility. You want to be agile on the product priority. But if it requires a reorganization to change product priorities, then it’s clearly too expensive. A lot of big companies have solidified something in their performance-management system or the org chart, and it becomes so stable that it’s hard to be agile, even though it might be a critical part of their business that should be more agile.
David Lee: For me it’s less about size than about closeness to the consumer. In start-ups, when there’s an opportunity through technology to leapfrog to fulfill an underlying consumer need, you have to be agile, particularly the closer you are to the consumer—in product, in marketing and sales, in the way you interact with consumers. But for the functions that are further away from the customer, stability’s required to enable it.
Brian Gregg, partner in McKinsey’s San Francisco office and head of McKinsey’s consumer digital-excellence initiative: Pavan, having witnessed Yammer from its early days all the way through to becoming part of Microsoft, is the playbook still the same?
Pavan Tapadia: We need product expertise in certain areas, the areas that don’t change. We always need people who are going to be experts in messaging or in search. But when we start to work on a big problem that’s important to the business, we pull people from those different domains, and that changes every quarter.
I think what you have to recognize is that work happens outside of the org chart. When you recognize that, big companies can start to be more agile while having stability underneath it. Smaller companies are much more purpose driven. The alignment to mission is pervasive. At a lot of big companies, it becomes much more career driven.
David Lee: To me, culture is what gets rewarded. I don’t mean just financially. I mean what behaviors, what kind of speech elicit support socially and result in career progress and financial gain? If you define culture that way, the examples in almost every large turnaround I’ve seen of culture failing is when the focus is on the superficial totems of culture. You know, the marathon sessions on, “Let’s debate as a team whether the mission statement should say, ‘should’ or ‘would,’” or “Are the values out of date? Let’s hire a great strategy consultancy to help us refresh the company’s values.”
Fonte: mckinsey.com
O CryptoID publica artigos em outros idiomas na coluna International News. Conheça.
