Using innovation management technology to banish bureaucracy and unlock your commercial potential with the support of some of the brightest brains in business, dropped on your desk by HMI-SEAC
Are your corporate culture, organisational structure and management philosophy set in stone, your cherished perpetual springboard to success? Or are you willing to open up to some paradigm-shifting ideas that may knock you out of your comfort zone but should boost your competitiveness, profit and sustainability too?
If you answered ‘no’ and ‘yes’, or even maybe, you might be interested to hear about some cutting-edge management technology dreamed up by certain savvy thinkers with proven track records of practicing what they preach to dramatic ends.
Southeast Asia Center (SEAC), representing the global strategic Innovation Management Research Center (IMRC) partnership in Thailand, in collaboration with Haier Model Research Institute (HMI), brainchild of Haier Group Corporation Chairman and CEO Zhang Ruimin, is on a mission to “co-create a learning ecosystem that promotes human-centric values and sustainable outcomes in organisations in Southeast Asia.”
Together, SEAC, IMRC and HMI have established “Southeast Asia Innovation Management Research Center (HMI-SEAC) Powered by Rendanheyi” the management concept conceived by Ruimin that has propelled the China-based multinational home appliances and consumer electronics giant to industry-leading and pundit praising prominence virtually overnight.
“Essentially, we help enterprise leaders realise the transformational opportunity of entrepreneurial growth through organisational ecosystems by applying Rendanheyi principles to people, capabilities, and business models,” illucidates HMI-SEAC’s Thailand-based Senior Executive Director, William A. Malek, co-author of “Executing Your Strategy”, published by Harvard Business School Press.
“Think of HMI-SEAC as a new organisational innovation and applied learning entity, aiming to unleash the potential in people in every type of business organisation in Thailand and around the region,” he expands. “Climb on board and we can move forward with transforming any business to keep pace with the rate of change”
Currently on offer to help you get there are innovation management disciplines channelled through three service clusters:
- Innovation Management Training: seven training courses on Rendanheyi and innovation management
- Global Knowledge Network: Monthly webinars with global experts in the Haier Model Research Institute
- Community Membership – founding membership of the IMRC community of practice.
Highlights of every month for members include a 90-minute webinar with HMI network leaders and experts in organisational design and transformation and ‘lunch & learn’ encounters.
Upcoming courses include: Rendanheyi Leadership; Strategic Foresight for Management Innovation with Rendanheyi; Rendanheyi Transformation Design & Execution, and; Project-based Learning for Rendanheyi Transformation Design & Strategy Execution.
“It’s all about providing the right mindset, skillset, and toolset for people and organisation transformation,” William emphasizes.
Thus, “SEAC seeks to cultivate a niche as Thailand’s and ASEAN’s most innovative and dedicated Lifelong Learning Center, uplifting skills and empowering lives through learning.”
The core philosophy and practices of Rendanheyi harness organisational and individual capability development in ways that drive palpable transformation. "Ren" refers to the employees and "Dan" to the user-value. “Heyi” is the product of combining the two – user value and + employee value realisation.
The basic idea is that every employee should directly face the user, create user value, and realise their own value sharing in the value creation process.
The series of webinars for Thai businesses kicked off on Thursday, 11 March 2020. Delivering the talk was Gary Hamel, an iconic figure in the business world who has helped many leading organisations drive their strategy, leadership, innovation, and change.
The infectiously enthusiastic co-author of “Humanocracy” and co-founder of the Management Lab has been ranked as Wall Street Journal’s number one business thinker and been described as the world’s leading expert on business strategy by Fortune magazine, and a management innovator without peer by Financial Times.
He was leveraging his evening in Silicon Valley to deliver a highly stimulating 9.00 a.m. Bangkok-time talk on “How to create a truly resilient and engaged organisation through application of Rendanheyi principles”, that no doubt left the scores of Zoomsters eager to get started infusing new dynamism into their organisations.
Gary started by calling for a revolution in management – “not just fixes at the margins, not a few new tools or techniques, but really going back to the fundamentals and reimagining how we run our organisations.”
“The fact that a bank can process millions of transactions a year, or a factory can turn out products of unerring quality and precision,” he continued, “are the fruits of decades of innovation in ‘management’ that is as much a technology as the chips in our phones.”
“But now we live in a world where change is accelerating, where knowledge is doubling every 36 months or so. We’re seeing radical change in business models, how we pay for things, how we move, how we consume media. The 31 million YouTube channels is what happens when you give ordinary people the tools of creativity and you open up new channels for them to post their work.”
“The challenge is to imagine a shift in how we lead, manage and organize that is as radical as all that. It may be hard, and it may be stressful, but we must try to envision organisations that are fundamentally different from those most of us are in today.”
He pointed out that larger organisations are inherently bureaucratic and seldom the authors of game-changing innovation.
“That’s left to the newcomers – but that has to change, too.”
He proposed that these large organisations have as many ‘disabilities’ as ‘capabilities’, not least that they are quite ‘inhuman’ and over-bureaucratised.
“And yet, the people inside are certainly human and have lots of abilities. They’re mostly personally resilient – we’ve seen that over the last year with the COVID crisis. They’re extraordinarily creative, caring, and passionate. And so, the problems of our organisations are not problems with us as individuals; they’re management technology symptoms.”
He cited a recent Global Workforce Engagement Survey by Gallup that found that only 15% of employees are truly engaged. The other 85% are just showing up at work physically.
“They're there and they're obedient, diligent, and intelligent but they're not bringing to work their creativity, initiative and passion, the things that matter most in today's creative economy.”
“In fact, most organisations waste more human capacity than they use, and we really need to change that.”
Sclerotic bureaucracy stands in the way, however.
“It shouldn't take a leadership change to give an organisation permission to move towards the future. And yet, as long as we have multi-tiered hierarchies, this is what happens.”
Nevertheless, many leaders today are learning the painful lesson that you can’t compete successfully in a networked world with a hierarchical organisation. We also have to challenge not only that old pyramid structure but the ideology of management, Gary ventured.
“The word ‘manage’ means to enforce control, enforce compliance. I am not against control but over time it escapes the bounds of common sense. In most organisations, personal discretion has been reduced to a bare minimum.”
According to Gallup, globally only one in five employees believes their opinions matter at work. One in eight say they can influence decisions that are important to their work and less than one percent have freedom to think like an entrepreneur, take small risks, work on new solutions, products and tools.
How do you actually hack that old management model? One of the keys, says Gary, doubling down on a fundamental tenet of Rendanheyi, is to build a strong culture of ownership where the people have real decision-making freedom – “freedom to set their own strategy, to organize as they see fit, and to distribute rewards.”
He said a lot more and towards the end of his presentation he mentioned a meeting he had with Zhang Ruimin in the Sunshine State some years back. He said he particularly remembers one thing the business sage said: “At Haier, we want to encourage employees to become entrepreneurs because people are not a means to an end, they are not instruments, tools, or resources, but an end in themselves.”
“I had never heard a CEO cite Emmanuel Kant’s categorical imperative before!” Gary exclaimed.
He continued with is closing remarks.
“When we look across all these post-bureaucratic companies, what you see over and over is a common set of principles. They're companies that believe that every employee needs to feel like an owner, where your influence and your compensation is not tied to a formal position but it's a meritocracy.”
“When we are trying to do this kind of radical change in organisations, we crowdsource, we open it up to the whole organisation and we create a constituency for the future.”
Next up on Thursday, 8 April 2021, from 7:00 – 8:30 am Bangkok time is “Lessons Learned: Application and Practices of Rendanheyi Model in Large and Complex Organisations”.
It should also be riveting: the speaker is Kevin Nolan, President and CEO of GE Appliances, a Haier Company. As William explained, “GE Appliances was bought by Haier in a cash deal a couple of years ago and as a large organisation with over 12,000 employees all over the world, they have been embedding and learning about Rendanheyi ever since. So, if you come along, you’re going to hear how the ultimate bureaucracy machine that set the benchmark for leadership management 30 years ago adopted Rendanheyi principles and thrives.”
Listeners will learn how Rendanheyi worked with a company outside China, the challenges faced by the management, how employees responded to them, and how the model helps GE Appliances build sustainable entrepreneurial growth and innovation.
Registration is via http://bit.ly/3lomdHw
For more information, please contact: Nattavut Thespol via 08-1890-4336 or nattavut_t@seasiacenter.com