Business Architecture, Inc.

Capable People

"I've found that there's a striking relationship between really good strategies and really strong leaders."
 – Michael Porter
"My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too."
 – Jack Welch
"Show me managers who think they can rely on formal planning to create their strategies, and I'll show you managers who lack intimate knowledge of their businesses or the creativity to do something with it."
 – Henry Mintzberg
People's Capabilities:
People's Capabilities Developing competitive advantage requires capable people. With broad and effective paricipation in the process, those capabilities are grow with the repeated strategy formulation and execution.
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Without Capable People, Even Effective Processes are Ineffective.

Capable People -- Capable Organizations

Capable people are one of the three elements of the framework for strategic management competency. It is useful to distinguish between organization capabilities and the capabilities of individuals. Capable people engaged in an effective strategic management process produce organizational capability.

Organization Capability

Within the context of the strategic management framework, there is not so much a specific individual who is a strategist, but the group of individuals engaged in the strategic management process. Collectively they study and discover patterns, learn about their organization and industry, seek and follow a vision, and find strategies as well as produce them from their observations and assessments of the organization's activities. The organization becomes collectively capable of developing insight, focusing on the right activities, producing the right objectives, aligning resources, executing strategy, and renewing and adapting the organization through the ongoing performance of the process.

Capabilities of Individuals

To develop the organization's capability to effectively formulate and execute strategy, capable individuals are needed. The people's capabilities can be grouped into three categories of skills, knowledge, and understanding:

  • leadership and management
  • innovation
  • business architecture

Collectively, these capabilities provide what is needed to produce a strategic management competency.

Leadership and Management

Leadership and management refer to such things as leadership, discipline, courage, decision making, strategic thinking, business savvy, intuition, and entrepreneurship.

Innovation

Innovation involves creativity, understanding and seeing opportunities for uniqueness, innovation of management, business design, and offerings, finding higher order solutions in conflicting requirements, and finding new ways to produce synergy.

Business Architecture

Business architecture speaks to harmonizing the business design with design principles and rules which provide an advantage. Understanding and utilizing principles of modularity to satisfy broader demand at lower costs is one example. Another example, developing a modular organization structure based on democratic principles, makes the organization capable of dynamically adjusting to shifts in demand and requirements.

Business architecture searches for and develops business design solutions based upon design rules which build into the organization what would otherwise have to be attended to by management decision makers. For example, mass customization makes the question regarding what to offer much simpler. A modular democratic organization will flex and restructure dynamically, eliminating the need for management to try to keep the organization design current and optimal.