Dickie Steele says McKinsey has long used the equation that delivered performance equals full potential minus organizational interference.
“delivered performance is your full potential less organizational interference”
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Dickie Steele
1 episodes · 13 quoted claims
Dickie Steele says that in the era of AI and agentic technology, technology factors as well as human factors now contribute to the gap between strategy and performance.
“it's no longer just the human factors, it's also the technology factors”
Dickie Steele says emerging organizational models are built for many decisions made by accountable project teams over short cycles, unlike traditional models built for a few long-cycle bets.
“the emergent models that Julie's referring to are all built for many decisions to be made by project teams who are accountable over a short cycle period.”
In McKinsey's executive interviews, higher-performing companies were more likely to see AI, digitization and data as tailwinds, while underperformers saw them as headwinds.
“Higher performing companies were more likely to find opportunity to feel that AI, digitization and data, uh, were going to be real tailwinds for them.”
Dickie Steele says traditionally organized companies rated their readiness to capture value from AI, digitization and data significantly lower than emerging-structure companies, by as much as twenty points.
“organizations that were more traditionally organized, um, rated their preparedness to capture value from these tailwinds of AI, digitization and data significantly, um, at lower levels than people in emerging organizations.”
Dickie Steele recommends that the top dozen to fifty leaders of a company run a rapid diagnostic of its operating model together.
“Particularly if you can get, say, the top fifty leaders, certainly the top dozen leaders of a company, to do that diagnosis together.”
Dickie Steele says his team sometimes has a hundred leaders play a simulation of reallocating resources in a quarterly business review before a company adopts a new operating model.
“sometimes we'll have a hundred leaders all play a simulation for how would they reallocate resources in a quarterly business review”
Dickie Steele describes a client that had grown by acquiring about a dozen companies without fully integrating them.
“an organization that had grown through acquisition. Um, it had bought a series of companies, for the sake of argument, let's call it about a dozen, and hadn't fully integrated them.”
Dickie Steele says the acquisitive client had defaulted to finance-led control, with tight resource allocation and budget management, because it lacked a full organizational design.
“in the absence of kind of leadership and a full design, they'd put finance in charge.”
The client created a 'sales interlock process' in which sellers told the new product function what customers wanted so products could be developed accordingly.
“That was called the sales interlock process. So sellers would tell product what customers wanted, and different products would understand what they needed to innovate.”
Dickie Steele says the client's redesign and implementation took about nine months, plus another twelve to eighteen months to reach full potential.
“that whole process of design into implementation took about kind of nine months and another twelve to eighteen months to really get to full potential”
Dickie Steele recalls a mentor describing an 'old wine, new bottles' problem, meaning the same people were put into new roles and expected to perform differently.
“I had a mentor who commented on a on on a client that they had the the old wine, new bottles problem.”
Dickie Steele says chief human resources officers are increasingly expected to have a technology background to plan the workforce for new operating models.
“we're already starting to see this emerging trend of of CHROs having to have a technology background”