What is Inclusive Business Transformation?

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is the memorable quote from Kevin Spacey in the 1995 movie “The Usual Suspects.” In 1864, Charles Baudelaire alludes to the same in “The Generous Gambler”, published in Le Figaro “la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas”.

Companies are the same — they exist and believe they are good enough — because if they were not, they would fix the problem. The devil is in the details; this article details how they can manifest the devil and fix what they don’t know can be fixed.

Change in any business is a change journey where stakeholders go from an AS IS to a TO BE destination.

Inclusive Business Transformation integrates employee and management objectives to drive effective change, adding value to a business’s bottom line.

The Devilish Problem — AS IS

In all the companies I have worked in, my challenge was establishing a measurement process to assess and improve employee productivity and reduce costs.

The problem was that management believed the current processes and practices were already optimised. If they could be improved, they would have done so.

The pushback was usually, “We don’t hire people we don’t need”, “Everyone works hard, and we have assessed productivity already”, and “If you are right, do I need to fire managers who are not doing their jobs?”

My Response — AS IS

I have saved my employers and customers over $200m in 23 countries over 30 years, and nobody acknowledged they were working inefficiently — I needed to “show,” not “tell” people how to execute bottom-line impacting changes.

When you Google “Business Transformation Failure Rate”, the answer is 70%. This is typically because consideration is only given to investment in technology and not people impacted.

I used to request that I could be forgiven for wasting 10% of every $1m saving achieved — this was spent on people training and development (DEI) because the reason for the 70% failure is that people see cost reduction by management as losing their jobs.

My Process — AS IS

I have managed global teams and different nationalities respond in different ways because of regional cultural norms — Geert Hofstede details this in his country factors tools covering ( Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint).

An example between the EU and the USA required I adapt all US training programs focused on building teamwork to help EU staff become more competitive and decisive — and vice versa.

DEI is a process for driving cultural maturity into a company to expand country factors and build trust to better utilise the minority talent pool by ensuring bias and prejudices are suppressed and previously excluded minorities are integrated as productive team members.

Typical Excuses — AS IS

Quality and cultural acronyms like BPR, TQM, DEI, LEAN, 6 Sigma and Agile are expressions hated by production-focused managers because practitioners promote them as an end rather than a means to an end.

I avoid using the terms at all costs — but I have used all the processes they espouse to achieve my objectives.

Using Metrics as a Weapon — AS IS & TO BE

Staff turnover in Customer Care is a common problem — had a 60% staff turnover in one organisation with one month of training. This resulted in four months of productive utility requiring three sets of 300 service staff annually. I reduced the turnover to 40%, and the annual staff requirement was two sets of service staff annually — a considerable saving that avoided the cost of hiring 300 people each year.

Typical DEI interventions fail to realise a bottom-line impact as training is usually restricted to a single function — in this case, Customer Care — vertical budgets for vertical silos.

A cross-functional intervention that removed the cause of Customer Care dissatisfaction and voluntary attrition worked — we used customer care staff in testing and releasing the product, which improved end-to-end communication and empowered a previously disenfranchised team to perform better.

Productivity and Cost Impact — AS IS & TO BE

In addressing the cultural and productivity issues, I had global teams of engineers all performing the same tasks to measure relative productivity — this enabled me to move productive managers to locations that could benefit most from their support.

Specific Metrics results:- Relative productivity (Ireland 1/ Malaysia 0.5/ Japan 0.5/ Australia 1/ USA 0.5), and relative cost (Ireland 1/ Malaysia 0.3/ Japan 3/ Australia 2/ USA 2). Dividing productivity by cost, Malaysia was 166% of the performance of Ireland and Japan 16% of the performance of Ireland.

I sent managers from Ireland to help them learn how we did it drove productivity and quality.

Japan’s 25% defect rate dropped to 0.8%, saving millions.

Resistance by traditional management was eliminated because the CFO and CEO measured impact and rejected excuses that had been the norm — usually pejorative racial stereotyping.

Where you can Start — TO BE

Create capacity to change by identifying and addressing the top three pain points that currently are top of mind — talent (recruitment, retention, upskilling), customer care (service quality, cost, customer satisfaction), product (development, sale, profitability)

Ensure roles and responsibilities for every function are in place and minimise rework, speed and profitability of products and services to customers.

Look at the current organisation and the members’ assessment of each other’s performance — 360 performance works well here.

How I can help — TO BE

Talent — Reduction of involuntary attrition.

Product & Services — Assessment and elimination of internal silos and toxic management.

Outsourcing — Assessment of candidates for outsourcing and establishing processes and practices that ensure outsourcing objectives are met.

Conclusion — TO BE …or not to be?

Do you still believe your “Devil” hides in the details and you don’t need to change? It will be too late when you get “religion”.

Your change methodology should integrate employee and management objectives to improve profitability and productivity.

AI tools are coming to change the world of work forever.

Inclusive Business Transformation facilitates upskilling and retaining staff to use AI tools as a weapon for their good

Inclusive Business Transformation works — I have been doing it for 40 years.