Excellence - Innovation - Transformation

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.