Architecture of High Performance Organisations
A high performance organisation does not just happen. It needs to be designed, then built, one capability at a time, with a sense of persistence and goal direction that defies your competitors’.
Intellectual capital lies at the heart of any successful high performance organisation. Research indicates that high performing and financially successful organisations define and manage intellectual capital better than less successful ones. They also have higher levels of intellectual capital than their less successful counterparts, pr
oving the strong positive correlation between financial performance and intellectual capital.
Intellectual capital can be broken down into three components, namely client capital, process or organisational capital, and human capital. Of the three, human capital is no doubt the most important. Without talented, high performing people, process capital is likely to dwindle over time, followed closely by client capital. And without clients, a business may as well close its doors.
An independent, longitudinal study carried out by Dr Pieter Bronkhorst, founder of Evalex, to research the correlation between managerial quality and revenue growth across a global sample of 40 organisations and more than 1 000 managers, confirms that talent matters! Executives of high growth companies have a higher level of competence than those of low performing organisations.
Putting the theory into practice
Evalex can assist you in building a high performance organisation through the implementation of a number of research-based, critical intervention strategies to help build intellectual capital within your organisation.
These intervention strategies focus on a wide range of issues, but when human capital is considered, the following are key.
When considering the market value of a company, Intellectual Capital features prominently as a driver of value.
Using our proprietary intellectual capital management solution, Evalex Strategy, we are able to help organisations to bridge the gap between strategic intent and the bottom line by managing the changes required in human, process and client behaviour to achieve financial capital objectives.
Evalex Strategy integrates all aspects of intellectual capital management into one internet-based application and system that is easy to use, cost effective and compatible with the rest of the Evalex assessment suite.
Evalex has as it’s raison d’être the development of high performance teams and high performance companies.
Evalex Strategy
When you consider the key strategic issues that keep a CEO awake at night, the following may be on the list:
- Is the business going in the right direction?
- Is the business optimally positioned in the market?
- What is our competitive advantage?
- How competitive is the value chain of my business?
- Have I got sufficient talent?
- Is everybody focused on what they need to do and are they performing?
- What are the key strategic actions for the future?
Evalex’s Dr Pieter Bronkhorst has been researching the causes of corporate decline and successful corporate recovery strategies for many years and has been awarded a PhD from the University of Cape Town for his ground breaking findings and theories. He has been involved in more than 30 successful corporate recovery and growth projects, where he facilitated the development and implementation of winning corporate interventions.
With more than 35 years’ experience in the field of developing high performance leaders, high performance teams and building high performance companies, our exposure to the phenomenon of corporate strategy has allowed us to conceptualise, develop and hone effective processes that have evolved over time based on research and experience.
The core capability of Evalex Strategy is the reversal of the fortunes of a business
It is easy to forget that the most significant element of an organisation is its people. People get together every working day to achieve the corporate mission. In attempting to achieve this mission or purpose, they formulate strategic direction, set objectives, invent procedures and introduce routines. Rules and regulations are created, norms and standards are set and order follows. These patterns of behaviour are exercised with regularity. Attitudes, values and beliefs develop and become entrenched. What we know becomes comfortable and accepted.
At the end of the day the bottom line (profit) is simply the accumulated effect of people’s behaviour. The essence of organisation is to translate behaviour into profitability. This is a complex equation and the key to corporate success.
Evalex Strategy, one of the modules of the Evalex Talent Management system, aims to create an institution vital enough to cope with the unparalleled changes in our socio-economic environment. We achieve this by helping to structure and integrate critical processes that translate your organisation’s values, behaviour and approach into profitability.
Evalex Strategy is an extremely potent instrument for organisation revival and development. It is a dynamic process that involves all the members of your management team in a collaborative effort to ensure effective integration of critical management processes. This results in behaviour patterns and interactions that greatly enhance the output of the group.
We know that achieving increased revenue and reduced cost is not simply a matter of heightening sales activity and reducing costs across the board. The reason for this is that revenue and costs are a result of the successful synergistic integration of a number of organisational and business processes.
A business process in this context can be defined as a process through which the delivery of the product or service to the customer is achieved, e.g. order entry, sales, point of sale, customer relationship management, cargo bookings, billing process, logistics, etc.
An organisation process, on the other hand, supports the functioning of the business process and includes elements such as vision and mission formulation, strategic planning, organisation design, budgeting process, capital expenditure, recruitment and selection, performance management, etc.
Evalex Strategy evolved and developed over time based on research, experience in growing business organisations and a review of many successful corporate transformation cases. It contains the distilled essence of these cases as well as the wisdom of those top executives who have succeeded at it. Evalex Strategy enables a management team to think through organisational and business processes and to redesign and realign them in order to achieve the profit objective.
Strategy Facilitation and Review
The Evalex Strategy solution consists of three phases. Phase one involves a range of half-day exercises, each designed to analyse the business from a uniquely different perspective. An analogy would be to take different snapshots of the business from multiple angles. The outcome of this set of exercises is a wealth of information about your company and your competitors.
Phase two translates the information gathered during phase one into a strategic blueprint, which provides a distinct definition of the strategic themes or programmes to initiate (usually between four and six).
Phase three involves translating the strategic programmes into the next level of granularity, formulating strategic projects for each programme and translating strategic imperatives into the top teams’ performance contracts.
The Evalex Strategy process requires commitment and time investment – between six and eight days of intervention-time – to succeed. At the end of the process, though, the results are worth it. The system has been instrumental in dozens of successful corporate recovery projects and has directed the strategic actions of scores of organisations and business units.