by Peter A. Arthur-Smith

“Becoming a winner is clearly important: becoming a success dynasty, however, is the ultimate prize!”

So many companies, sports teams and ambitious organizations have their success stories, although relatively few know how to sustain them. That’s likely partly due to their limited understanding of organization dynamics, as well as due to their ability to sustain focus or to avoid burnout. With these three causations in mind, why don’t we examine each one in turn to unearth what nuggets are hidden behind them?

Organization Dynamics – Despite all the knowledgeable books, articles, and well informed lectures out there, so many ventures get stuck on producing numbers without fully appreciating the fundamentals that propel those numbers. Without that vital understanding, they are likely to end up chasing their tails and success may only be fleeting. So, instead, they should become fully acquainted with three fundamentals that collectively sustain such numbers:

• Strategic vision – Do you have an ongoing compelling vision, associated strategies, resources, value proposition, and venture culture that inspires sustained commitment?
• People power – Do you have ongoing essential people talent, capability, teamwork and motivation within your various teams?
• Leadership capacity – Do you have vital, ongoing leadership talent, capability, teamwork and motivation at all leader levels?

If you have these three vital, ongoing, and synergistic components that are well placed and collectively nurtured, they will provide the organizational engine to build and sustain performance over time.

(Note: As a British parachute regiment colonel recently quoted me from an American Vietnam war advisor, who pointed out: “When you can’t measure what is important, you make what you can measure important.”)

Ability to Sustain Focus – Society, marketplaces and ventures are dynamic and constantly evolving. It’s like the tides at our local seashore that constantly churn and shift beaches from one place to another. While we cannot allow our ventures to be in a constant state of flux, we do need to take regular timeouts to assess our current positioning, journey and intended destination.

For leadership teams: apart from start-up situations requiring weekly-monthly reviews, regular timeouts at  six-weeks, two-months or quarterly points are imperative. The exact timing will depend upon your momentum and inherent capabilities; also influenced by your need to change direction or induce a change of pace. We will call these moments Periscope Time. They are moments when we raise our venture periscopes to gauge our current situation and survey our opportunity horizon. We can then adjust our position in a thoughtful and effective way. (Note: We specifically choose effective over efficient, since effectiveness sparks innovation, breakthroughs and elegant solutions, while efficiency fixates on squeezing, short-cuts and fine-tuning. Efficiency is the euphemism for immediate profitability, whereas effectiveness produces more durable profits once an effective solution is in place, i.e. efficiency follows effectiveness rather than the other way around.)

The upshot of every Periscope Time session is rather like successful sports teams that fully evaluate and re-position themselves prior to key games. It draws all your leadership team members onto the same page and reinforces commitment toward forward momentum and success.

Avoiding Burnout – As our western economies come under ever increasing economic pressure, because they pursue outdated efficiency modes to address multiple societal ills, so our ventures of every shape and stripe – as well as citizens – are subjected to enormous demands to perform efficiently. Demands created by ill-informed local and national governments, Wall Street type exchanges, executives, politicians and bureaucrats. Efficiency is like trying to sustain steam in an ice-house!

The reality is that our current approach is unsustainable, notwithstanding that everyone is now looking to AI as our current savior. AI is more than likely to be misused by those with the power to do so for efficiency solutions, so we could well miss the opportunity to apply effective ones. The latter involves dealing with our five current curses – bureaucracy, hierarchy, efficiency, negative-messaging, and corruption… sauce for another paper. These are often hand in glove with efficiency thinking and too often cause burnout.

Avoiding burnout includes leaders and their teams resisting its onset by:

• Adequate delegation, sharing of workloads, and re-thinking role requirements.
• Leaders surrounding themselves with capable people – not cheap labor.
• Setting and negotiating clear and reasonable expectations all-around.
• Have everyone become experts in setting their priorities – what’s vital, important and nice to be done.

You may well have other suggestions beyond these three areas – organization dynamics, sustaining focus, and avoiding burnout – although these will go a long way toward building success dynasties. An additional helpful factor is for key Visionists or Strategists to consider vacating their role within ten years. There will always be exceptions, although ten years is an appropriate timeline for most venture leaders/strategists to move along and allow for their dynasty to be built. Selection of such individuals is a topic for another paper.