Major Advantages of RO: Scalability, Linking Strategy to Action and QQTR

Speaker A Got it. My name is Scott Hine. I've worked at Novus International for just under two years, started in September 2007. My responsibility, my areas of responsibility include a very large corporate infrastructure project that we're doing, which is related to somewhat to it and somewhat to business process. So really it's a program that's intended and will deliver new capabilities to Novus, as well as enhance our capabilities to react to the marketplace and to work with our customers a lot better, all the while giving us the tools and the capabilities to improve our profit. That project happens to just be called Project Vert. An interesting project. I also cover corporate strategy, work directly with the CEO and his staff and report to the board on that. I also manage the non financial internal audits. So those are looking at the operational and the efficiency impacts that we can have in areas that are of concern for one reason or another, be it overt or something that needs to be investigated that hasn't been looked at before or in a long time. Those are really the key areas. My title is Executive Director, Strategic Initiatives. An interesting role because I cover many facets of the company from the perspective of there is no one function that is my domain from a sales operations marketing perspective. But yet it's a corporate role that covers aspects of each one of those. And it's intended to help us organize and improve how we operate to deliver more, better, faster. Essentially, in the Jack system, I'm at the highest level of level four. How is this different from where I worked before with respect to exercising my full capability? It's an interesting question and it's one that I think for my particular role and for myself might be an interesting answer as well. The role that I have was created. It was identified as part of an assessment that the corporation did and a review from an audit, believe it or not, during sometime in late 2006, early 2007. The outcome was to look for an internal auditor. But the actual need for an internal auditor wasn't necessarily a full time role. But what it was looking at was as the company grows, how do we expand our capabilities and how do we continue with the level of efficiency that a 200 person company has while growing to 500 people without necessarily the infrastructure that it has? So how has it helped? What it allowed me to do was it allowed me to basically the systems, the mechanisms, the guidelines around Ro allowed me to shape my role. So in essence, my role had been defined and understood by the board of directors to do one certain thing. And I was able to deliver that by looking at different portions of the company and setting my role to meet that need, but working for and with key executives that have very high level, long term decisions to be made. So my role needed to match theirs inherently. It's kind of a vague answer, but it's specific in that my job is to help look at a time frame and help the company be successful within a time frame from a strategic perspective. My role was also designed to help translate that strategy into reality. And that's really the interface of my role. I do have individuals that work for me that help me execute that as well. And that also helped me deliver the right tasks for them for their role. So it helped me really, I guess, figure out how to segregate and define what I would do within the boundaries, but also I defined those boundaries. I've had the fortune of working at a few companies and I've had fairly long careers at those companies. One was a very large consumer products company of which I worked at for ten years in multiple roles around the globe. And the other company was a very large consulting organization that again, I worked at in multiple locations around the globe for about eight years. If I look at large organizations or even medium sized organizations given a consulting company, because they don't tend to operate globally. They tend to have to operate very locally and within the scope of the office's responsibility, then it's an interesting question, because the outcome that I see and the difference, really, that I see between Ro and the rest of the world is I think there are really three main differences. One is I see the requisite organization as scalable, or the requisite guidelines in how to build a requisite organization is a scalable thing. By that I think that the strata, the expectations, from the time horizons, those things start to make a great deal of sense when you think about it in terms of other organizations. And I ask myself, why don't they do things the way that we do now or the way that I know how to do them now? I should say so. My prior experience led me to see a lot of matrices and cross functional organizations, which I don't disagree with for the businesses, but I could see clarity of operation and quicker decision making within if Ro rules were applied. I think the second key thing that I see is really we are able to link, at least I feel I'm able to clearly link and I think the senior staff is clearly link our corporate strategy and have a way a mechanism to bring that down to task level for individuals in the organization from going from that level six in our company all the way down to a level one even within our company. And to me it's very crystal clear how to get there. I believe that the rest of the senior staff have that exact feeling as well. And we were able to translate that two years running into what we're doing. So I think that's another big differentiator. I think the third one is it's the true application of people resources, quality and timing. It's the Qqtr. Other companies talk about it, but they don't do it. Again, in prior organizations I've worked in those things, they're vague or they don't materialize. Or if they do materialize, the boss that you work for who actually really forces you to put those on paper has done you a favor and has done the company a favor. If the goalposts move or things change, yes, of course you can move those timelines, but it gives you something to focus on, to get something done, to meet another person's deadline. It really starts to build the dependencies of how an organization truly operates. So those three key things, I think, are major differentiators scalability, linking strategy to action and actually enacting and truly living qqtr my experience as a consultant was very interesting. I ran what would be traditionally called in the consulting world as large infrastructure or transformational changes for companies. And I did that twice outside of North America. In fact, my entire career in consulting had been outside of North America. So I had the again, great exposure to different cultures, some of them Western, some of them very Occidental. And those cultures also provided an overlay for how Ro, I think, doesn't break those barriers down, but again, gives clarity to individuals about how to get things done or how the organization expects things to happen. The way I would describe my Asian experience, which was a pan Asian retailer combined with manufacturing and a very large, heavy kind of financial controlling infrastructure. What I noticed was that networks were important within the organization but I never saw goals, much less anything that was specific around Qqtr written down, unless the projects that we were running were actually helping manage those things. So we would second a certain number of individuals from the organization, from the client organization to work with our individuals, and we would have a very clear work plan. So every day, in essence, or every week had a number of things that were very Qqtr. I would say that was the most structured that those individuals had seen. And you could see a new way of thinking if you back that into Ro and say that's actually how you operate, going from levels 654321 down to the executional, sub, three month task level individuals, we did that for them. We delivered that in the form of a work plan. Now, that was a project that doesn't tell you what your day to day responsibilities are a little bit different, but you could see how something like that cuts across cultural barriers and it's about working together to achieve a common goal. And to me, that's one of the things I clearly see within the Ro part of my role, where I see the ability to do that and I form my work around that, especially within the individuals, obviously in my organization, and then also how they work with other people outside. So they've got their complementary responsibilities as parts of teams to deliver things, or they've got to actually find the individuals and then make sure that those items are in their key accountabilities documents every year. So to me, I see a very natural process occurring using Ro that could easily be used there in my former consulting experience. And it would have been great exercise to execute that because I think projects would have been executed more seamlessly, and I think that the engagement level with the individuals would have been higher.