It is about 45 minutes in length and includes the entire PowerPoint. We will be posting some extracts from it on the website in the next month.

I was rear-ended a few weeks ago by a driver with State Farm insurance. We reported the accident from the scene and got a police report. State Farm took everything they needed from that initial report and the police report. They arranged for the appraisal, scheduled the repair at my car dealership, handled all the paperwork with the dealer, arranged for the rental and payment of a rental car, and paid every cent of everything. Their interactions with me were timely and professional.

Enterprise rented the car to me during the time the car was being repaired. They picked my up at the dealership when I dropped off my car, had the car ready when I showed up, called a couple time to make sure I was happy and that the service had been friendly, checked me in quickly and drove me back to the dealership when it was time to pick up my car. Their interactions were too warm and friendly from my perspective, I don’t need an emotional connection when I’m renting a car. The calls to check on my satisfaction both came a bad times during the business day and took too long. But they were consistently friendly and warm.

On Friday, I tried to order pizza from Pizza Huts website. My password wouldn’t work. I tried the option to resend my password, but after 30 minutes had never received my password – I even checked my spam folder. I tried to register again but I couldn’t because I had already used my email address. I tried to look up the menu, but couldn’t because the system said I was in the middle of placing an order. Their use of technology frustrated me.

So I called customer service. They could not reset my password or make sure it got sent to me. They had to forward the request to their web master. It took four days for my email and password to get to me. They knew this was a problem that people were experiencing. They couldn’t take my order either. They gave me the number of the local Pizza Hut to call. When I called, the person that took my order was obviously very busy and let me know that in the future I could place my order on-line. Their use of technology did not serve their business either.

State Farm clearly has their capabilities aligned with the customer’s needs and expectations at the Forward Edge. Their use of technology to integrate with their partners and keep track of everything was seamless. Enterprise also has their capabilities aligned with the Forward Edge. I wonder how many other people feel that the tone of the service reps on the phone calls were too invasive or took too much time with pleasantries. Pizza Hut has the trappings in place of serving the customer, but their capabilities are not aligned with my needs. I sure the ordering system saves them a lot of time and expense, but I may never order from Pizza Hut again.

Pizza hut made an unhappy customer and wasted a lot of their time because their website has a bug and their customer service reps don’t have access to the right tools. How well do you understand your capabilities at the Forward Edge? What do you have in place to understand the customer’s needs and satisfaction at the Forward Edge?

Now, forget for a second that we are talking about combat. Let’s talk about serving our paying customers. This edge is the most single most important aspect of your business. Let’s call it the forward edge of the customer area, or FECA. It is also where things are messiest. Sue Willet at Bird’s Eye View has a great cartoon that scoffs at the implementation of automation to control costs at this point.

Serving our customer’s is what it is about. I haven’t read about or been in a single strategic planning meeting where the objective was to reduce our ability to provide service to our customers. We need our best, most prepared, most flexible people there. We need to focus our all of our automation, logistics, and process support at preparing these people to deliver value to the customer.

Yet, in the interest of cost savings or  consistency we make decisions about compensation, outsourcing, and automation at these points that result in a less favorable customer experience. If you did a detailed inventory of the capabilities within your organization, it is likely that less than 15% are actually directly interacting with the customer. This is where effectiveness is more important than efficiency. In every other aspect of your business, you can focus on efficiency, but not here.

Unwelcome automation, inflexible service, blaming the customer for lapses in the organization, failure to deliver what was promised to the customer — and I experienced all of these in the last week. What are you to make sure your customers have great experiences? What are you doing to focus all other aspects of your business on the forward edge of the customer area?

This might come from the Swiss Army Survival Guide. "When lost in the woods, if the map doesn’t agree with the terrain, in all cases believe the terrain."

A project plan, an executive’s vision, and the team members’ perspective all tend to be based on how things ought to be or were supposed to be. That’s the map. The terrain is what is important to the success of the project. You can’t manage from the map. You have to get grounded and manage from the terrain. That means deeply understanding: your objectives and obstacles, what has really been accomplished and what needs to be done (whether the project plan reflects it or not), the performer’s motivations, the organization’s values, and what we personally are capable of and interested in achieving. Why spend a lot of energy pretending that a map is valid when we know that it isn’t?

As innovators in management we need to look for the realities of the people, the organization, the work, and ourselves to be successful. When the map becomes more important than the terrain, we aren’t helping anyone.

40 million jobs, is that a lot? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 150 million Americans in the work force. 40 million jobs moving overseas is over 25% of the jobs in the US. What could cause this to happen?

China has 798 million people in their labor force. India has 509 million workers available in their labor force. Their real wages are far below the US and Europoe. As education rises in these countries and communication technology improves, businesses will move work to where it can be performed well-enough at the best cost.

Stop and think about what this means. The way companies do work is going to change.  We are just entering the knowledge-based, or project-based, or information-based world. My kids will be entering the job force as this world becomes predominant. It took 50-100 years to get really good at managing industrial based organizations. The businesses and individuals that figure out how to thrive in this new world of work are the ones that will survive and grow.

Aligning a dynamic organization with strategy, understanding and improving processes across your business (regardless of your organizations boundaries), productive collaboration, talent management, and project management become key skills to build and manage organizations that will thrive now and survive in future.

The ability to gain competive advantage from these shifts, both for you and your organization, is there today. On the other hand, 10 years is a long way away. You can wait for someone else to figure out how to run businesses profitably and manage the new workforce. I chose not to wait. What will you be doing in 10 years?

Have you ever tried to dribble a basketball between your legs or behind your back? Have you ever tried to pitch from a pitchers mound? Have you every tried to throw a karate kick? When you first do these things, they are very hard. You will look awkward and feel foolish. If you are determined to learn, you can practice them until you feel you can do it. This is Shu – learning the fundamentals. The first time you are actually dribbling through traffic in a game, or pitching to a big guy with a bat, or trying to fight an opponent, these techniques are suddenly very hard again. You feel that they won’t work. You have to learn them all over again under the nuances of a real life situation. This is Ha – learning to perform the fundamentals in real life. Ri is when you can apply these techniques correctly without even thinking. And the gap between the people who are great at these things, who have reached Ri, and those who haven’t is really big.

I took Shotokan for a number of years. Shotokan is a strict martial art. There aren’t a lot of fancy moves and there isn’t a lot of improvisation in the forms. I found this restricting at first and I asked my master, Mister Takashina, why we couldn’t improvise new moves like other maritial arts did. I can’t demonstrate his unique Japaneese/John Wayne accent so I won’t even try.

"Dennis, William Shakespeare had 26 letters, just like you. He perfected the use of those letters. Giving you more letters may impress some people, but it won’t make you like William Shakespeare. Your challenge is to focus on perfecting the application of what you already know."

I see this as one of the fundamental challenges of organizational learning. The techniques that work in the classroom or in a book, don’t work the first time given the challenges and exceptions that aris in real life. So, people either "go by the book" even when it doesn’t make any sense. Or, they go about doing whatever doesn’t get them fired. You see this when people are enforcing policies that clearly are destructive to the people around them. You also see this when people are just going through the motions and not trying to do any better than what is expected.

We don’t strive to transcend to Ri in business. There are many techniques and opportunties for unbelievable improvements in performance. They require the desire, effort, and practice to get them through Ha to Ri. Ri is not performing without intention. It is being able to perform something in the real world perfectly and without effort.  Watching Dwayne Wade play basketball, Roger Clemens pitch, or Chuck Liddell fight are examples of Ri. Have you seen examples of Shu Ha and Ri in your organization? Where have you let Ha stop you from improving performance? Where do you need to strive for Ri?

The study describes factors influencing execution of strategy, barriers to strategy execution, and improving strategy execution. One of the source surveys for the study found that

"the biggest impediment to successfully executing a business strategy was not change but simply doing things they way they’ve always been done."

I have studied and applied change management techniques to overcome resistance in many projects. But "simply doing things the way they’ve always been done" isn’t active resistance, it is simply the power of the past and habits.  Habits form over a long period of time. They are burned into the brains of the people in the organization. Simply communicating the benefits of a strategy to someone won’t suddenly change the wiring of their brain.

This is like fielding a ground ball. You can point out to someone who has a bad habit fielding a ground ball the right way to do it. You can explain to them why it is a better way. But without a lot of practice and feedback, they may not change their habit.

One researcher at MIT found that habits exist in the basal ganglia of the brain. Habits take a long time to create, and are not easily changed. Many of the techniques that are used for breaking habits aren’t very effective. For example, negative feedback that is disconnected over time from the event is very ineffective. While positive feedback, immediately after the event is very powerful. This explains why it is so hard to stop smoking or over eating.

Hal talks a lot about how habits affect project management over at Reforming Project Management.

"Habits die hard. To think that we can provide a shot in the arm misses the nature of being human. We are social beings. We are biological beings. The routines of social interaction are etched into our biology. The biologist Humberto Maturana describes this as structural coupling. Through repeated interactions with others we develop ingrained patterns or habits of response and engagement. These habits allow us to be effective with those around us."

Breaking habits, or forming new ones, requires three specific actions. First, you have to pay attention to the habit. Second, you have to establish some way to gather feedback on your ability to perform the new behavior. Finally, you have to practice the new habit over time.

What does this mean to changing how people dealing with other people inside of an organization to perform work? You can’t just describe the results of a new strategy to people and explain why its important. You have to define the new habits required and have mechanisms in place to ensure people pay attention to the new behavior. You have to provide feedback, hopefully immediately and positively, when the new behavior is performed. And, you have to deliberately practice the behavior over time.

If "simply doing things the way they’ve always been done" is the top impediment to executing strategy, what steps are you taking to change the habits in your organization?

In my conversations with business executives there is a lot of confusion about what Business Architecture is. Business Architecture provides the link between the strategy of a business and what a business actually does to accomplish its strategy. At the highest level, it isn’t about process, technology, or people. The whole point is that by describing what a business does and where there are gaps in ability to achieve the strategy in terms of capabilities, management can more easily decide where to focus its efforts.

Enterprise Business Architecture defines business architecture as:

"what the enterprise must produce to satisfy its customers, compete in a market, deal with its suppliers, sustain operations and care for its employees."

"Enterprise Business Architecture defines the formal link between the enterprise business strategy and the results predicted from supporting strategic initiatives. "

"A comprehensive framework used to manage and align an organization’s business processes, Information Technology (IT) software and hardware, local and wide area networks, people, operations and projects with the organization’s overall strategy."

National Institutes of Health

"business architecture serves as the interface between the needs of the enterprise as reflected in its work and the IT solutions that facilitate that business. "

Nexient has the best definition I found, although it is applied specifically to government:

"Business Architecture provides a disciplined approach to the alignment of programs, services, and processes with the strategic goals of government. It is a formal, structured mechanism for evaluating the current state of programs, services and processes against the desired state, and for giving decision-makers the information they need in order to direct resources – human, financial, technical – to the best effect."

So its not about technology, its about the business. Here are some keys concepts to wrap your head around business architecture:

1. Strategy is difficult to execute unless you can clearly articulate what a business has to do to accomplish it and then align all the efforts of the business with that strategy. For example, increasing profitability is a complex thing to accomplish in a business. Business Architecture is a way of understanding this complexity in your business. It can overcome "silo-myopia" to help define what is the next most important place to focus process, technology, and people efforts to accomplish your strategy.

2. Business Architecture involves models of the business. Because people live at different levels in the organization, have different responsibilities, and may have very different areas of expertise, not everyone has the same perspective of what is important to the business. Without a way to model and gain agreement on what the business is about, strategy is difficult to execute and conflict will arise when prioritizing efforts.

3. It involves extending your view to articulate your strategy and customer capabilities.

4. Because it talks about what you do, not how you do it, it remains stable even when the implementation changes.

What is fascinating is that most Business Architecture projects are run by IT departments because they need this clarity in order to build systems that will concretely manifest themselves. However, when IT owns the Business Architecture you essentially have the technology people defining the strategic direction of the company.

One final quote from Enterprise Business Architecture:

"No one will ever consider building a complex structure such as a skyscraper, automobile, ship or airplane without blueprints based on a complete set of integrated architectures. However, we consistently build, merge, reorganize, and run enterprises without a set of equivalent blueprints or architectures. "

Who owns the blueprint for the future of your business?

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