Is Your Capital Worth Restricted by Conventional Thinking?

The biggest obstacle to business and management improvement is conventional thinking. Result-performance Management, a simple innovation to organize and manage the business of the corporation has now been launched. Conventional thinking says we base any improvements on the way that things have always been done. This creates a barrier to using R-pM for conventional thinkers, because nobody has ever organized and managed the business before.

Conventional thinking is the biggest obstacle to business improvement

What is conventional thinking? Various on-line dictionaries do not provide a definition. Conventional wisdom is the common accepted belief or perception about a particular matter. Conventional thinking employs conventional wisdom. One dictionary defined conventional as “usual or established: using well-established methods or styles” So conventional thinking is based on well-established methods or styles.

In business change, we have the need to think outside the box. Often people, who feel that they are thinking outside their box about a particular matter, are still thinking inside the box of conventional thinking. Thinking outside the box of conventional thinking requires questioning the fundamentals of 20^th century structures.

In business change, conventional thinking dictates the academic or conventional approach to change. This approach uses the published record or the way things have always been done as the foundation for change, and seeks to make an incremental improvement, through performance improvement books or methods. Business management schools and publishers prohibit unconventional thinking and require that all work be footnoted to ensure that it is based on old conventional thinking.

Modern media allows people to absorb conventional knowledge, rather than thinking and discovering new knowledge

When developing new solutions or websites, one axiom is that people are mentally-lazy and do not want to think. They want to be spoon-fed knowledge. The modern problem is that people absorb what they know from television and the Internet, and are losing the interest and ability to think and discover new things themselves. People look up conventional solutions, rather than analyzing the problem for their own precise solution. This keeps people inside the box of conventional thinking.

Conventional thinking prevents the breakthrough to meet 21^st century challenges

We also find that the enterprise must compete in the 21^st century world of advanced information and communications technology, fast change, worldwide competition and collaboration, strategic value creation, intellectual capital and application of intangible assets, supplier-enterprise-customer value chains, leveraged human capital and capabilities, the information environment, and all kinds of other requirements that our 20^th century methods cannot cope with. But we cannot come up with the breakthroughs needed to produce the 21^st century enterprise, because of conventional thinking.

Instead of rethinking the 21^st century enterprise from the bottom up, we create new structures to overlay on existing 20^th century structures. Even business transformations, like Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Total Quality Management (TQM), created new overlays on the existing business and organization.

The bottom line for the 20^th century enterprise is that conventional thinking inhibits change and prevents the breakthrough needed for the transition to the 21^st century.

Need for unconventional thinking to create a new base for 21^st century conventional thinking

All that is needed to go from 20th century structures overlaid on the business to organizing the business for 21st century management is simply to organize and manage the business. The conventional definition of the enterprise business is “the activity of providing goods and services”. We only need to organize and manage the activity of providing goods and services. The objection to organizing and managing the activity of providing goods and services is that the enterprise has never been organized and managed that way.

What is needed is just a bit of unconventional thinking to replace the existing conventional overlaid structures and to organize the activity of providing goods and services for 21^st Century Management. Once we do this we will have a new conventional method as a basis for improved conventional thinking in the 21^st century.

Result-performance Management (R-pM) is the 21^st century breakthrough

There is a method for organizing and managing the business for the 21^st century enterprise, called Result-performance Management (R-pM). R-pM organizes the business activity of providing goods and services. The business activity is performance. The business goods and services are output results from business activity. R-pM organizes the enterprise business for 21^st Century Management using only:

• Results: The specific economic outputs produced by the business
• Performance solutions: The specific capital employed by the business to produce specific results

Once the organization is simplified, R-pM manages the 21^st century enterprise in three dimensions:

• Result: To exceed goals and generate revenues
• Performance: To utilize capital to meet expectations and increase profit margins
• Management: To manage by time period to develop and create strategic value

This is it. Everything done in the 21^st century enterprise is defined by results and performance managed over time. All organizational units and responsibilities are defined by specific results and performance solutions.

The biggest barrier to 21^st Century Management is conventional 20^th century thinking

Result-performance Management (R-PM) breaks through the barrier of conventional thinking. But R-pM must break through the barrier in every corporation that uses R-pM. People will rationalize the adequacy of familiar methods. Many people, consultants, and vendors have a vested interest in protecting outmoded 20^th century structures.

The 21^st century enterprise requires high-worth human capital

One important rule utilized by R-pM is that all capital, including human capital, must be a solution of worth that is qualified to be deployed to produce value in specific results.

People, who are willing to learn new ways, think of improvements, apply judgment, and make decisions, are high-worth human capital, deployed to produce high-value results. People who just want to be told what to do and go through the motions are low-worth capital deployed to low-value repetitive results.

Becoming human capital of high-worth means opening the mind to new methods or styles and developing and applying high-worth capabilities to produce high value-quality results. R-pM acceptance requires those few high-worth people who understand the breakthrough value of R-pM to take the lead and leverage their own human capital worth through R-pM.

If you think you can get past conventional thinking and develop as high-worth human capital, study Result-performance Management and learn how you can improve your own human capital worth, and how your enterprise can organize the business for 21^st Century Management, and leave 20^th century problems behind.