I strongly recommend a McKinsey article on using knowledge brokering to improve business processes, with some simple but powerful points. E.g. effective business processes are key to performance throughout a firm, and do not result from a random process of making-it-up-as-we-go-along-and-see-what-works, but a deliberate process of search and design. The article focuses on product-related and other simple innovations (not the over-hyped ‘strategic’ type), and includes some nice simple examples.
Aug 192009
Capabilities clearly enable performance – if your organization can do key tasks, faster, cheaper or better than others, then you will develop stronger resources in a more powerful system than they can. But academic strategy articles on the topic are mostly too abstract to connect with the practical appraisal of skills and capabilities in organizations. So it’s good to see a down-to-earth approach to assessing skills from McKinsey – asking people to evaluate their own needs. But there’s more to a team’s or organization’s capabilities than just the sum of individuals’ skills, so could the same approach work for self-assessment of team capabilities?
If such capabilities consist of Continue reading »
