The document discusses the challenges of complex transformation projects within companies. It provides examples of how factors like strategy, organizational structure, culture and practical issues can impact transformation efforts. Specifically, it notes that successful transformations require: 1) A clear strategy and agreed upon key success factors to drive efficiencies and competitive advantage. 2) Aligning the entire organization behind the strategy, which is difficult due to complex external environments and short-term thinking. 3) Addressing deeply entrenched cultural reasons for resistance, like "macho" attitudes against change. 4) Managing practical issues like excessive emails and meetings that reduce productivity.

1. 56 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014
The transformation of a company is like a journey of
discovery. It requires a change of roles for senior exe-
cutives, and HR concepts supporting self-controlling
learning processes.
he paradigm of working within the boundaries of team
structures and organizations is currently being replaced by
collaboration. The greatest challenges for companies are to
operationalize these working scenarios in terms of transforma-
tional management and creating business cases for it. There is
currently no company that defines these strategic missions as
a self-contained, stand-alone project from a global perspective
or can be taken as a distinct market leader. Instead, drivers for
individual projects in different fields and sizes are mainly overall
cost reduction programs. In addition to the known solutions
in temporary employment, outsourcing and project business,
those many individual projects show how unique trends will
shape the near future. One shift of paradigm is the understan-
ding of a new set of drivers that are influencing the way of wor-
king.
A multigenerational workforce, demand for skilled workers,
global competition and other factors are contributing to change
in the resource management. Some of these changes continue to
affect where, when and how work gets done.
The success of collaboration is about a partnership between
the organization and its employees. The allocation of resources
needs to be based on required expertise, economic criteria and
availability. Creating a value chain along the business process –
being aware of a resource intelligence model.
T
Transformation Journey
About the Paradigm
Shift in Working and
The Tale of Change
and Transformation
Labour resources are allocated to such processes to accomplish
dedicated tasks within the business process in order to achieve
an agreed upon business goal.
These resources may be assigned from within a company´s own
workforce and/or from outside. Based on a proper underlying
technology and collaboration platform the resources are not ne-
cessarily co-located but may be spread across different locations
or even continents.
Resource Intelligence is about:
• Allocation of capabilities, availabilities and knowledge
• Enabling collaboration, scaling and accelerating co-creation
by providing a collaborative eco-system for agile, easy,
global, secured, ip-protected collaboration solutions.
• Engaging micro-crowd based interaction beside heterogenic
governance structures and working paradigms.
Essentially such new working paradigms, rise the question how
companies can drive the change on that?
Transformation challenges taking the
example „airport design“
A real business example of the challenges that transformation
poses is an airport design. Those at the older age bracket of the

2. 57 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014
baby boomer generation will still remember a time when air-
ports were places you turned up at about an hour before your
flight. You checked in your bag, grabbed a cup of coffee at one
of the few coffee shops that existed in the airport, sauntered
through immigration and boarded your plane – notice at this
point no mention of any serious security checks.
Things are different today although ironically the core purpose
of processing passengers is the same. Essentially an airport is
designed to take its passengers into a departure terminal, have
them check in their luggage while issuing them with a boarding
pass. After that they go through immigration and security and
then sit in the departure lounge until their plane is ready to
depart. On arrival at their destination they go through immi-
gration again, collect their bags from baggage claim, go through
customs and depart from the airport. As core processes go it is
not a particularly complex one.
Some years ago airport authorities realized that as they walked
through airport terminals looking at how space was allocated to
this core process they discovered that it only occupied 40-60%
of the total space available. So what occupied the rest of the
space? The answer to the question continues to evolve.
When it was first asked in any serious way, the answer was shops
and restaurants. Airport authorities had begun to realize there
was potential revenue to be made from a captive audience with
not much else to do than sit around and wait for their plane.
Today an audit of airports around the world would include
shops, restaurants, casinos, games arcades, golf ranges, hotels,
nurseries, places of worship, airport lounges, barbers, massage
parlours, movie theatres, sleeping pods, children’s playgrounds,
nature trails, gyms, swimming pools, spa services and art exhibi-
tions – to name but a few. This explosion of services represents
the first transformational dilemma. If the purpose of an airport
is to move people quickly and efficiently through a terminal
why would you clutter up half of the building with activities
which appear to contribute little to that process. In fact many
around the world would argue that it is precisely because there
are so many distractions flights are constantly being held up.
Passengers become distracted and despite endless announce-
ments they lose all sense of time.
When it was decided that passengers should arrive two hours
ahead of their flight for an international flight and one hour
ahead for a domestic flight there was a reason behind it. Some-
one had worked out that it represented the time necessary to
move passengers through the core process of an airport – and
only that. The rise of terrorism was the first tipping point air-
ports had to adjust to and the security checks in airports today
probably account for more heated disputes and raised blood
Source: nexeda based on „The Transformation of Business“ from Ross Dawson
Figure 1: Paradigm of New Drivers for Organizational Development and Co-Creation
Business
Driver
Technology
Driver
New Drivers for
Business Improvement
Social
Driver
Economic Structure
• Media economy
• Divergence in performance
• Distributed work
• Modular business
Competitive Intensity
Demand for a talent •
Blurring industry boundaries •
Everything global •
Pace if innovation •
Exponential Growth
Mobility •
Data and storage •
Interface •
Prosesing power •
Expectation
• Excellence
• Meaning
• Transparency
• Accountability
• Opportunity
• Scalable relationships
• Governance for transformation
• Talent supply chain
• Flexible organizational structures
• Dynamic strategy
• Distributed innovation

3. 58 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014
pressure than almost any other business activity. Equally the area
required to carry out the searches has expanded considerably,
but interestingly the time to report for a flight has not changed,
which puts the system under constant pressure.
Yet without doubt the most significant tipping point was the
realization that airports had become massive revenue generators
despite the fact that little of the activity associated with passen-
gers spending money in airports has little to do with embarking
passengers on planes in a timely fashion.
Ultimately the design of airports and the facilities provided
within them illustrate the two key elements facing all businesses,
predictability and complexity. If all planes arrived on time and
the time a passenger had to report to an airport to catch a flight
was an accurate reflection of the time needed to process them
it could be argued that all the amenities provided would be
largely unnecessary. Of course the world isn’t predictable and
that creates complexity. Once you assume passengers will have
time on their hands providing a coffee shop and a book shop
is not going to meet customer expectations, but the more that
is built into an airport terminal the more complex the process
becomes. Some argue passengers should be made to report three
hours ahead of time for the international flights and two hours
for domestic. That would ease pressure on security and immi-
gration but then how do you amuse passengers?
How does the solution of complex transformation
projects look like?
There are no easy answers. After all, creating and implementing
a strategy, providing leadership and generally influencing the
environment in which everyone works are the key factors.
Essentially the answer lies in four different categories:
Strategic Reasons: The degree to which companies will tolerate
inefficiency is much higher than most people would imagine
and this starts with a company’s strategy, or frequently, lack of
strategy. The number of companies that don’t have a strategy that
has been well conceived, discussed, clearly communicated and
well understood at all levels is maybe a little higher than many
people imagine. Admittedly, very large organizations may have
an over arching corporate strategy and then regional or business
unit strategies within that which makes life more complicated.
Whatever the organizational construct, a coherent strategy is at
the heart of every company’s existence and confusion over what
it is or a complete lack of one causes hours of fruitless labour,
duplication of effort and general frustration.
Business strategies are often long and complex documents
created after equally long and complex discussions but essentially
they are trying to answer one question:
“What do we have to do uniquely or at the very least better than our
competitors to succeed?”
In a world where the external environment moves faster than
ever before this is becoming an increasingly difficult question to
answer but listed below is an example of the type of key success
factors that companies typically use:
This list is illustrative rather than exhaustive so if there is a fac-
tor essential to the company you have in mind and it is not on
the list, feel free to add to it. The exercise requests you to list a
maximum of four. While there are many factors that need to be
considered as part of strategy formulation, one of the biggest
challenges is that companies try and do too many things, which
is ultimately self-defeating.
Once you have decided upon the four, ask 30 of your senior
colleagues from the same company to do the same exercise in-
dependently. Once everyone has listed their four, share your
collective results. The perfect answer is 4 – i.e. everyone chose
the same 4 factors showing a deep and consistent understanding
of what the company is trying to achieve and a single sense of
purpose not often found.
The nightmare scenario is 120 different factors. Thankfully
you are not likely to face that dilemma if for no other reason
than it is difficult to imagine 120 different key success factors.
However, if the number of factors chosen starts to creep up into
double figures – which is not unusual in an exercise like this –
the dilemma facing the organization becomes all too apparent.
This lack of focus cascades down through the organization and
it is possible for people to work significant hours and never
achieve the return such effort deserves.
Key Success Factors:
• Economics of scale
• Research and Development
• Product Development
• Quality of Product
• Innovation
• Organizational
Efficiency
• Unique Proposition
• Procurement Capability
• Quality of Technical
People
• Customer Service
• Image
• Pricing Strategy
• Creativity
• Speed to market
• Niche Player

4. 59 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014
Organizational Issues: It is one thing to agree to a strategy – it
is a whole different challenge to align a business to deliver it.
The environment in which companies operate today is signi-
ficantly more complex than 20 years ago. To begin with, the
speed of change is accelerating, shortening product life cycles
and in some cases the lives of companies themselves. Pressure
from some parts of the financial markets community and cer-
tain shareholders has created an expectation of instant gratifica-
tion. Such demand for short-term success has made “organic”
growth difficult to achieve. As CEOs are questioned every 90
days about the progress they are making it is not surprising that
short term solutions are often sought. This in turn creates poor
quality decision-making and if a company is not careful leads to
a vicious cycle.
Cultural: It is claimed that no-one lying on their deathbed has
ever been heard to say that they wished they had spent more
time at work and transforming the company. Yet if you ask most
people who they are, they will start by describing what they do
to earn money – that isn’t who they are, but it does seem to play
a significant part in how we define ourselves.
Cultural reasons for people working in transformational pro-
jects are probably the most difficult to deal with because is many
ways they are the most deeply entrenched. Top of the list of
such examples is what is generically referred to as the “macho
culture”. Broadly speaking the argument ranges from “I did it to
succeed – so you can do the same” through to “no one was ever
successful in business just dancing in the ring of transformati-
on projects.” There is a difference between running large scaled
transformation projects and transforming smartly. The latter
still requires time and effort, but it is characterized by people
who step back for long enough not to lose sight of the big pic-
ture, and who keep their efforts in perspective.
Practical: It is ironic that the last category has largely arisen as a
result of advances in technology and in particular the dreaded
email. A recipient of more that 50 emails a day – and that would
include almost all executives – is likely to spend up to 3 hours
a day just reading and responding to emails. If they add 4 or 6
one-hour meetings on a daily basis it is easy to understand how
many executives find their time totally occupied by emails of
attending meetings – as opposed to dealing with the outcome
of the meetings. Attendance at so many meetings should be
­questioned, as should the efficiency of such meetings and how
well people prepare for them.
Good old fashioned “time management” went out of vogue a
long time ago. Yet the principles apply as much today as ever
before. In a given day, week, or month there is only a finite
amount of productive work an individual can produce and the
ability to prioritize is essential. It might be that people are beco-
ming increasingly aware of the issues caused by excessive hours
being worked on transformation projects. Yet surely people have
been concerned for years and it doesn’t seem to have had any
effect on the willingness of people to commit to such transfor-
mational demands.
Arguably, the most pressing issue is whether a business has a
sound basis on which to operate, identify new opportunities
and convert those into competitive advantage when the most
senior in their ranks are working under permanent stress. Hard
work and long hours will keep a business and transformation
projects ticking over but it is exceptionally difficult in such situ-
ations to know how well a transformation is performing. So if it
is apparent that there are so many concerns what is the answer?
New roles for Senior Executives
The fact that complex transformation projects are still the domi-
nant modus operandi in most organizations, underlines that the
answer isn’t simple. Equally even if there are generic solutions,
how they are applied will vary from company to company and
that level of detailed analysis is seldom done. The fact that it will
take time means that each afflicted company will need to find a
CEO or Senior Executive team who is willing to go through the
pain but who might be around long enough to experience the
benefits. To that point it might be that trying to do something
like this across a whole company in the first instance represents
a step too far. Separating out a business unit and conducting a
“controlled experiment”, a “minimum viable product” might be
a better solution until the lessons can be scaled up: “Incubating
a prototype of transformation projects”.
The desire for greater transformational balance, the demands of
young people, the weakening of the employer/employee bond
and, the speed, at which change occurs makes it difficult to ima-
gine how a company will benefit in future by not facing up to
the challenge. The most important action is for companies to do
an accurate, detailed and honest analysis of how they operate.
Most companies believe they know a great deal more about how
they operate than is actually the case. Interestingly Employee
Engagement surveys often serve to highlight this but senior ma-
nagement is so anxious to be seen to be doing something that
they enter into an endless cycle of addressing symptoms without
fully understanding causes.
A clear strategy and agreed key success factors should become
one of the products of such analysis and this alone should drive
out many efficiencies and enhance a company’s competitive ad-
vantage by transformation projects.

5. It might be that a clear setup of transformation projects for
everyone represents a bridge too far in terms of what they are
willing or able to do, but in a world that will become ­increasingly
complex and uncertain:
• it is very difficult to see how transformation projects is going
to be the solution for everything.
• it is very crucial to aware the issues of change management
and leadership development.
It applies to the managers to review critically the current per-
sonnel and management development paradigm. It is about to
identify those components in the existing development system
may that be used further and those that need to be updated or
replaced. Let us consider that more and more companies are
reshaping their way of working by the extended use of agile
work solutions and by operationalization a “fluid organizational
model”. It makes the ability to design and execute change much
more important, but also to ability to empower employees to
accompany this change. In addition, managers must ensure
and facilitate that the increasingly number of operating teams
­continue to work towards the company‘s overall strategy.
Assumed from current “standards” in talent management the
following points will find a special attention:
• Engaging the strategic components of workforce planning
and talent management.
• Revision of competence models and competence profiles.
• Change in the management culture and governance models
• Utilisation and operationalize of change management und
project management methodologies.
• Usage of digital technology, especially social media and
collaboration tools.
If you concentrate on the role of the managers, this means that
they transfer much more power and responsibility to teams and
concentrate to take over and facilitate a much more strategic
and entrepreneurial network role.
The paradigm shift for the role of a managers transform them-
selves „from-to“:
• Administrator to entrepreneur and „co-founder“
• Instructor to facilitor
• Trainer to mentor
Source: nexeda
Figure 2: Transformation Journey
• Clear Direction
• Key Focus Areas
• Strategic Mission
• Readiness
SCAN
• Adaption
• Success Stories
• Piloting
• Execution
FoCUS
• Framework
• Prototype
• Leverage
• Clarity
create
• Improvement
• Agile Support
• Partnering
MobiliZE
• Scaling
• „Co-Invest“
• Multiplication
ACT
Through the Learning Journey your people grow and are able to unleash their capabilities to execute a transformation!
Accelerate your
Transformation Process
Collaboration Leadership
Execution Capabilities
Social Learning
Open Innovation
Transformation Journey
Growth Path
60 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014

6. 61 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014
About nexeda:
> Experts in Resource Intelligence
> nexeda is an independent information, competence and resource
hub for executives & organizations.
> nexeda has developed integrated collaboration techniques that
help customers take advantage of collective intelligence and crowd
sourcing.
> Within nexeda we analyse, design and work together with
companies on their challenges of daily operations and resource
management.
> We research, develop and use cost-effective solutions to accelerate
– the „return on information asset“.
> The company bases its services on a managed pool of experienced
executives & specialists, linked together into a global working
party, dedicated to co-creation
The standardized organisational model is transforming itself to
a situated, changeable and crisis-grade network. How all these
aspects can be adapted and made be real life has to be accom-
panied, because „no-one fits for all“. But one aspect is fact –
our economy is undergoing a radical transformation. Business
­models that have been successfully used for decades are ­covered
by a massive wave of digitization and individualism. This
reminds for HR departments a request to rethink people and
organisational development to be more collaborative and on the
other side more individual.
Therefore, sustainable HR concepts are increasingly
­concentrating on self-controlled learning processes that are
­largely integrated into the everyday work of employees. The
­total ­paradigm shift in the way of working, smart HR solutions
and the ­associated change in the learning culture and manage-
ment culture is an exciting journey – an exploration journey for
HR transformation.
Peter Wright is CEO and Founder of Acorn
­Strategy Consulting and Competence Partner for
people transformation & change management at
nexeda. He is a truly global executive experienced
in leading HR functions for some of the world’s
best-known companies. Peter is highly skilled
in leading organizations and executive teams
through significant growth, crisis and business
­transformation, including mergers and acquisi-
tions divestitures, restructuring, organizational
­transformation and public offerings.
Dr. Frank Edelkraut is a Managing Partner at
Mentus GmbH and Competence Partner for
change ­management & leadership development
at nexeda. Frank is an ­experienced HR interim manager
with a sound background in project management and HR
management. Focusing on change and transformation
projects, he is an expert in ­social ­learning methods like
mentoring. As an expert for ­leadership development he
focusses on programes that are value creating by delivering
learning scenarios and ­training, e.g., 70:20:10-model, within
the operational workin­g environment.