Keith Coates discusses the importance of organisational culture and how this effects strategy. Explaining that organisational culture is now as important as the vision, mission and other key measurements used in business today.

 

Keith provides insight on how you, as a leader, can begin to assess and formulate your own organisations culture.

Leaders have many important responsibilities in the exercising of their leadership practice – vision, decision-making, strategy, team building and PR immediately spring to mind; yet there is a ‘hidden’ responsibility that might just be the most important of all: company culture.

 

The term ‘culture’ has two sides: one being the ‘cross-cultural’ nature of things. The cultural diversity that is part of every leader’s portfolio whether they like it or not; the coming together of people of different cultural backgrounds, bonded by geography, generations or a shared world-view. The other side of ‘culture’ refers to ‘the way things are done around here’ – in other words, the way in which people within your organization behave. This is the ‘culture’ that we are talking about here.

 

Pieter Koerstenbaum’s organisational model suggests that culture is the leader’s primary focus. This makes total sense yet is seldom the reality. Most leaders focus on strategic formation and execution of strategy, a topic that forms a core part of any leadership development programme and is central to leadership education. Leaders are raised believing that strategy is their main focus and along with strategy comes vision. Of course strategy is important but research has shown that the majority of strategic initiatives fail to deliver on the intended outcomes. Research suggests that only between 10-30% of strategies are ‘successful’ which, given the investment that underpins most strategies, is a very poor return on investment! These are good strategies put together by smart people that raise the obvious question: how then does one account for the failure of these strategies?

 

From the various research conducted into this area, the biggest reason found for this delivery failure is that the company culture doesn’t support the changes envisaged and embedded in the strategy. In other words the people either unwilling or are unable to support the changes being implemented. The strategy might need to change but if the company culture doesn’t make the necessary changes, the strategy will fail.

Data virtualisation is not about IT – it’s about giving decision-makers immediate access to all the relevant information and only the relevant information. Information has become the strategic business advantage; hence how well businesses use the information at their disposal determines how well they perform in an increasingly competitive environment. Simply owning vast amounts of data is not enough. To deliver business value, this data must be instantly accessible to the business decision-maker through a single access point, in formats that are easily understood.

 

Data virtualisation delivers the solution. This agile data integration approach has matured over the last few years, and now allows organisations to gain more insight from their data, respond faster to ever changing analytics and BI needs and save 50-75% over traditional data replication and consolidation methods. Growing numbers of enterprises are seeing its advantages. Analysts Gartner, TDWI and the BI Leadership Forum have each estimated adoption at around 25% today, with projected growth to 50% within two years.

What is your ‘next move’ as a leader? Well, of course that would depend exactly on what it is we are talking about, but here would be a variety of topics – and some suggestions as to your ‘next move’.

The workplace environment is constantly evolving, and in order for businesses to remain competitive and thrive in this changing environment, effective leadership is vital.  This is according to Hennie Heymans, Managing Director of DHL South Africa, who addressed the attendees of the 2013 DHL Tomorrow’s Leaders Convention, a gathering of South Africa’s leadership alumni, which took place on Friday.