Let's bet on the young!

How to keep an organization young

Looking at the various stages of a company's development, it is easy to see analogies with a living organism. Just as a child needs years to reach maturity, a company needs years to reach a level of maturity characterized by productivity and profitability with flexible and creative operation. A company is like a mature human being in the bloom of vitality and professional strength, and this is where the similarity between it and the aforementioned living organism ends. For man inevitably passes into the stage of aging, while the company does not have to age. It can permanently remain at a stage of maturity at a stage that ensures effective market functioning, with creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation in action, so it can forever remain young and vital.

Since it is natural for companies to move along the cycle curve, it is necessary to understand the forces and factors that determine how long a company is in a particular stage of development and why it remains there. These factors include neither the size of the company nor its age. Where a company is, at what stage, however, is often correlated with the age and size of the company, but it really depends on two factors: flexibility-that is, the speed and ease with which a company can adapt to new conditions-react to the environment, and self-control-that is, the ability to supervise internal processes, organize itself and organize its functions and procedures. At the point when a company has a high degree of self-control, but is at the same time very flexible, it reaches the optimum of its development. Before reaching this point, a company is usually flexible, but its capacity for self-control is incomplete. After passing the optimum stage, mature-aging companies have a high capacity for self-control but become less and less flexible.
The observation and study of long-lived organizations (those operating for more than 50 years) provides answers to questions about what techniques and tools managers use to preserve the organization's ability to grow, i.e. keep it young.

James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porrans studied key American organizations for many years seeking answers to the question of where the longevity and profitability of the visionary companies that are now setting the standards of management come from. They put these answers into the symbol presented below:

Jyn and yang..

These researchers found that the most successful U.S. companies are conservative (strong self-control) on the one hand, and focused on stimulating progress (flexibility) on the other; they achieve this by the following means:

• They set big, dangerous and audacious goals on which they direct their resources.
• They diligently adhere to set norms of behavior (culture), creating excellent jobs for those who conform and eliminating those who do not adhere to the guiding values.
• They have experimentation written into their management systems, involving trying many ventures at once while accepting that some will turn out to be typical "misfires." Such action allows these visionary organizations to explore new paths of development.
• They promote and advance only people imbued with the company's overarching ideology and culture.
• They follow the principle of " Never good enough" - they shape and stimulate a process of consistent self-improvement with the goal of ever better performance in the future.