Hack:
Being opportunistic pays off !

By Mohit Ahuja - MBA student at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon (India)

March 19, 2011 at 3:20pm

opportunity

Opportunity Exploitation Propensity

Opportunity Exploitation Unit

organization design

Moonshots

Retool management for an open and borderless world

Build "natural", flexible hierarchies

Expand the scope of employee autonomy

Summary

Organizations are nothing but a portfolio of resources and opportunities to create value. It is time that managers see it that way, and that they have powers and and the flexibility to use resources for promising opportunities.

This would produce an organization capable of flexibly responding to new opportunities without the lag which usually comes with scale and scope, and without compromising on the advantages which are inherent with these.

Problem

The issue is that large multinationals are unable to suitably leverage the skills of their employees and are usually limited by geography, hierarchy, and lack of transparency, proactiveness and sense of ownership.

For example, a small unit of a consultancy firm in Country X may not have the required expertise to handle the merger of two local banks but another unit in a Country Y may specialize in the same. Now either the X-unit can let go of the opportunity, or it can leverage the skillset of Y-unit. Here, the opportunity owner and the resource owner are different with different orientations.

Structure and control would be in the way of such a dynamic, and only If the interests of both parties and the employees are aligned can the option be explored. It's a Win/Win situation. A new design paradigm is needed which would enable the firms to maintain scale while having remarkable market responsiveness.

Solution

Along with the regular hierarchy of the company, there should be separate fluid 'Opportunity Exploitation Units' (OEU) which come together for tackling certain projects and then are dismantled once these are over. Creating new product lines, tailoring a solution to a client and leveraging the skillset of geographically spread resources are some of the issues facing large organizations which can be met by such a redesign.

The employees must also be encouraged to identify opportunities and to take ownership of the same. For this to happen, there must be an open culture in the organization which rewards such behavior and promotes initiative.

Practical Impact

Competitive advantage, i.e. gain through attributes and resources to perform better than the competition, is an important criterion for business success and opportunistic organization design provides a huge advantage to firms over their competition.

Once the intricacies are ironed out, this redesign would help organizations respond quicky and effectively to any market opportunities that arise, and there would be organization-wide benefit in terms of profitability, motivation, satisfaction, exposure, learning and consolidation.

First Steps

The first step would be to evaluate how this design fits into the business of the organization.

The various parameters can be:

Geographic spread
Hierarchy
Functional vs process design
Upcoming opportunities
Employee movement dynamics
Performance appraisal systems
Culture

A small test opportunity of short duration can be identified, handling which would traditionally have been out of the local unit or division's scope. Once that is done, a project leader can be assigned and given a free reign to choose and recruit talent from within the organization for the project and the dynamics of the short project can be studied. If there are any issues, they can be ironed out for the next few test runs.

If the organization sees significant gains from this way of functioning, then it can explore making this part of the organization DNA and can then take the stakeholders into confidence to proceed further.

Credits

Mohit Ahuja

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