Agile Working as a competitive advantage
Thesis: 10 years ago, people worked 60% of their max effort as a weekly baseline average. Now that number is 80%.
The VUCA* business environment of today increases the demand for responsiveness. Hence a stable team with low unintended retention becomes critical. Simultaneously, the share of fixed costs from that team is increasing, along with the daily work pressure.
So, as a business leader you’re being pushed from two opposite sides: From upward stakeholders to reduce your salary costs / in-directs. From your team due to an increasingly stressful environment.
Simultaneously you need to continuously embrace automation and digitization projects to maintain a highly efficient team.
Incorporating Agile Working will enable you to navigate and deliver on those needed improvement projects, whilst maintaining low team retention. AndersEffect can show you how. Just take a look at the Track Record
*: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This acronym draws on the leadership theories of Warren Beenis and Burt Nanus (1987), also introduced into the U.S. Army War College as a post Cold War concept.
The Power Triangle
Remove internal bureaucracy. Bury the silos.
Assuming your business comprises of three basic teams; Marketing, Sales and Supply Chain / Logistics, each team has their separate argument on why they should control the agenda.
Who is arguably most correct in the given business situation, and what is the impact for the others to choose one direction over another?
By doing a Power Triangle review of your business, you can learn the biggest deviations from the perfectly balanced triangle, hence learning how to steer your organizations into working most efficiently.
Power Triangle: The hypothesis
For simplicity, the Sales, Marketing and Supply Chain teams are used as examples. This can easily be translated to a different business design.
Your business operations are at an optimum state when the influence between Marketing, Sales and Supply Chain is in equal balance.
This is symbolized in an equilateral triangle: Each side is equally long, and the angle between all sides are the same.
Whenever one team gets to “call the shots”, that corner of the triangle moves away from the other two, leaving us with an image of a non-symmetric triangle.
The balance is gone; hence efficiency is lost.
Power Triangle: Pursuing the balance
The first factor that keeps the Power Triangle in balance, is the buddy-pair agreement to disagree with the third part of the Power Triangle.
Sales and Marketing would argue to just always keep a big enough stock of goods, in order to cover any given demand.
Supply Chain would completely oppose this, since inventory costs would sky rocket.
Having this two-sided alliance, which would completely disagree with the last corner of the Power Triangle can be repeated multiple times. This is exactly what keeps the Power Triangle in balance.
Power Triangle: Pursuing the balance
The second factor is around KPIs, and how having them opposing each other.
A classic Supply Chain KPI is order fulfillment / service rate . The lower you set that target, the less inventory holding is needed.
Sales would be working in the opposite direction, promising the customer to deliver all sizes of orders, at any time and place needed. This would on the other hand exponentially increase inventory and logistics costs.
Unlocking the potential efficiency in your Power Triangle
So how do we put this thesis into action?
AndersEffect offers a practical and easy accessible Power Triangle assertion of your business within a week, based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative data.
With the Power Triangle assertion ready, next natural step is to determine who, what and how to take this into real life, and how to secure it as a sustainable business operation model.
