From gorillas to competitive advantage

Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company, said:

"The only way to sustain competitive advantage is to ensure that your organisation is learning faster than the competition."

If this is so, then a fundamental question for all organisations is:

How do we learn faster?

You may be familiar with the Chabris and Simon experiment involving a group playing basketball and a woman dressed in a gorilla suit. Around 90% of a group failed to spot the gorilla pass between the players, stop, look at the camera and beat her chest. Amongst other things, the experiment illustrates the power of our Reticular Activating System (RAS). This cluster of cells is our filter on the world - it enables us to focus and concentrate on what we see as important (most people in the experiment correctly counted the number of passes) whilst filtering out other things. You may already see the link to sustaining competitive advantage:

If managers do not tune their RAS in the correct way, they will miss the indicators, clues and signs that aware managers will recognise as the beginnings of major threats and opportunities. HappyAtom can help to awaken managers to the factors that are changing the competitive environment.

Of course, awareness is only part of perception. We may see it, but do we understand it? Managers need to interpret what they see and decide what it means. As Deming said:

"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”

This is the value of management models; they do not give the answer but they help us to ask the right kind of questions. HappyAtom's courses are designed to help managers find the questions that will help to create new perspectives and a greater understanding of the competitive environment.

So, we now have managers who are good students! Of little value to the organisation unless learning can be converted into effective action. But what constitutes effective action?

Financial criteria are obviously important. At HappyAtom we believe that all managers need to move beyond a simple focus on quarterly results and understand the real drivers of shareholder value - knowledge, relationships, brand, processes etc - and how investment in these drivers can be justified in financial terms. One of these intangible drivers - brand - is of particular importance because every manager, whatever their position, has an impact on brand. Brand is how the telephone is answered, the way staff dress, the dirt on vans. HappyAtom can help to increase the financial acumen of your managers, enabling them to make effective decisions that balance long and short-term results.

To achieve sustainable competitive advantage it is not enough that individual managers "learn faster", the organisation itself must become a "learning organisation". For this to happen, managers have to communicate in all directions:

"The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished."
George Bernard Shaw.

• upwards - so that senior managers are aware of the signals from the grassroots that should shape strategy
• downwards - to translate plans into consistent effective action with their teams
• sideways - because outstanding performance depends on departments and functions working seamlessly together

HappyAtom facilitates this communication by providing a common language for managers and helping them to identify what actually needs to be communicated and how.

If communication - in any direction - is to have the necessary impact, the manager must have credibility. Having the best soft leadership skills will be of little value if managers are lacking commercial awareness. People must respect their knowledge, analysis, interpretation and judgement. We believe that HappyAtom can help to provide these elements and also imbue managers with greater enthusiasm and confidence to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

If your organisation is to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, it must learn faster than the competition. To discuss how HappyAtom may help in developing managers who are able to:

• see
• understand
• implement
• communicate
• lead

more effectively, please contact us.