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Three factors that can turn success into failure |
Three factors that can turn success into failure
Reinventing a mature company often means changing its entire mental model
Many mature organizations need reinvention. If you are helping your company reinvent itself as needed, you need to go beyond merely being flexible and responsive. Reinventing a mature company often means changing its mental model, including its approach to customers, suppliers, employees, and everyday working habits. It means constant evaluation and awareness of the big picture, as well as awareness of the details of getting everyday business accomplished. It means being ahead of change instead of being behind it. Lars Kolind is both a professional manager and a serial entrepreneur. As CEO, he transformed Danish-based Oticon, a maker of hearing aids, into a truly knowledge-based organization, rewriting the script of job design, organizational design, workplace design and communication. He took Oticon public in 1995, and left in 1998 to serve as a chairman of other corporations and to build up new businesses. Currently, he serves as chairman of the Grundfos Foundation, a billion-dollar corporation which is the world´s second largest maker of pumps. He likewise chairs the board of the Unimerco Group and the supervisory board of Kristeligt Dagblad – a national daily newspaper in Denmark. As a serial entrepreneur, Kolind has founded one new company per year since he left Oticon in 1998, these being in the fields of electronics, telecommunications, home security, design, management consultancy, drug discovery and software. In 1996, he won the award of Denmark´s ”Man of the Year.” In his book, The Second Cycle: Winning the War Against Bureaucracy, published by Wharton School Publishing, he argues that size, age and success can make mature companies deaf to signals that portend their decline. Here he summarizes his views that many mature organizations need reinvention.
48-49. pp
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