Becoming an organisation

A business has to have a successful product. You have to know how to make something that people want to buy. A great deal has been written about figuring that part of your business out. But a business also needs to function as an organisation, and long-term success involves figuring this out too.

I like the model of the organisation as an operating system by which the inputs (people’s work) get translated into the desired outputs (value for clients via enjoyment for your team).

A certain amount of the inputs will unavoidably get lost as waste because no system can be totally free of friction. But the bigger the organisation gets, the easier it is for more and more of the input to be wasted, as people pull in different directions.

A well functioning organisation helps people align individual success with collective success to just the right degree. This begins with making sure everybody knows what the organisation is for — what its ultimate definition of value is. It cascades down to making sure that people know what success looks like in their role, and how that will be measured, and how that fits in with other people. There are many interlocking components to a good operating system.