Excellence,
Innovation and Transformation; these three
words we hear everywhere irrespective of the forum we are attending. It can be
somebody selling a new real estate project or it can be a start-up company
trying to garner some funding or be it a political party talking about their
plans for future of the nation or it can be just talking about a gel pen; these
three words pop up in some shape or form almost everywhere. Are these just high
sounding words used by copywriters to create differentiation or it has
something more to it? Let us look little closer in to these three.
Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better
than what one has done previously in the activities one performs in personal
and professional life. The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving
upwards. There is no end to reach final level of excellence. It is a journey
which typically has view of only next milestone and remaining milestones emerge
as we move forward. We have seen many corporations who have undertaken a
journey from “manufacturers of shoddy products” to “icons of manufacturing
products with highest quality” over a period of time. If one observes their
journey closely then it becomes clear that when they started their journey,
they had some idea of next state of quality of their products which they could
visualize at that time and they devised different tools and methodologies to
reach the level of quality they had envisaged at the start of journey. But by
the time they reach this destination, the next level of Quality (next
milestone) emerges and organization devises different tools / methodologies to
reach this next milestone and the journey continues; it does not stop even when
the organization is known as icon.
An innovation
is something original, new, and important in whatever field that breaks in to a
market or society to create a new or better or faster or more effective way of
doing things. Innovation could be in terms of development of new product or a
new way to use the technology or a new / modified process but the ultimate aim
is to do things in better manner; e.g. you implement a different customer
engagement program (innovation) so that your satisfaction rating jumps from
“Satisfactory” to “Delight”. In other words we can say that Innovation is an
intervention with a clear focus on improving the level at which the
organization / individual is operating. It surely is selected for
implementation based on its potential to achieve the desired change and
multiple innovations are deployed by any organization in multiple areas at
different times in tune with the improvement desired. As we know the innovation
can be either “incremental” which changes the organization in small bits
without too much disturbance or it can be “disruptive” which brings in
significant changes with big benefits. However one thing is certain that every
innovation intervention acts as a booster rocket and takes organization to the
next orbital level.
Oxford
dictionary defines Transformation as “A marked change in form, nature or
Appearance”. In the business parlance it means either organization has changed
the way it operates and/or the processes it uses and/or the tools it adopts, to
achieve its goals in more effective and efficient manner. We call the
organization as transformed when the changes are significant to be noticed by
outsiders. The organizations typically define the transformed state to be
achieved and a journey is undertaken. Many a times there are interim milestones
defined and achieved as they pass through the journey. Typically the
transformation objectives are defined based on anticipated future needs of
business and is expected to be valid for a period of time depending on the pace
at which industry and technology are moving. So by the time organization is
transformed to its desired state and becomes stable in this state, a need for
new state arises and organization needs to assess and plan for next
transformation. So Transformation is a journey where the organization moves
from one state of operation to another better, effective and efficient state of
operation (which is noticeable to external world) in a continuous manner.
We
see that there is a common thread of improvement / betterment runs through
Excellence, Innovation and Transformation. The factors that are prominent in
each of them are slightly different but ultimate motive is same. They might be
different theoretically but when you use them in practice they run in parallel
with significant overlap. The diagram below provides a glimpse of one such
excellence journey in manufacturing
I was trying to build a relationship between these three and came up with the following.
Excellence is a continuous
journey which uses innovation as one of the vehicles to reach desired stations of
one Transformation after another.
