While Russell and Caspar spent time with our guests preparing some meals in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, we were in the garage playing with heavy tools: ‘how operating models and value flows can be used for effective business steering’ (see following figure for definitions).
It is no light matter to dive deep into verbal exchanges with top managers on strategies for establishing effective business steering based on operating models and value flows.
Our discussions began with a short introduction of our guests and then went along some guiding questions we had prepared.
A variety of insights were shared among our growing number of guests in the garage. For example we learned about the difficulties in industries whose competitive advantage lays in product development (R&D, PLM).
The timespan between resource inputs and outputs is long resulting in a challenge for the top management when deriving strategies for business steering in such a context.
Another guest drew attention to his experience struggling to get buy-in from management to use a Business Process Management (BPM) methodology as the basis for deriving performance metrics for business steering. On this topic many participants shared their approach on linking KPIs to business processes, some more mature organisations even derived KPIs from their enterprise process models.
For us as hosts it was an amazing experience to see the dynamics within the meeting. Over long periods, our guests took turns in leading and facilitating the conversation. So handling the heavy tools wasn’t so hard after all; We could just lean back and listen into this exchange of thoughts. So thank you to all the participants for your engagement and openness.
Also we would like to thank the party host Gülsüm who helped in the background to make this afternoon such a rewarding and exceptional event.
