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170. Annika Steiber: Rendanheyi is the Most Radically Disruptive Organizational Innovation

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Innovation in organization is at least equal in importance to technological innovation and product / service innovation. It tends to get less attention, which is a great opportunity for imaginative entrepreneurs to implement change for competitive advantage. Dr. Annika Steiber has studied organizational innovation for over twenty years and is a global authority. She shares her insights with Economics For Business, including her analysis of the most dramatic organizational innovation of all, Rendanheyi.

Professor Steiber’s most recent book is Leadership For A Digital World, and is her most comprehensive guide yet for business management in the digital age. She’s the author of eleven books, including The Google Model and The Silicon Valley Model.

Her Menlo College Rendanheyi Silicon Valley webinars are available at Menlo.edu/Webinars.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Organizational innovation doesn’t get the attention it merits, even though it can contribute greatly to customer value generation.

Innovation thinking tends to focus on technology innovation and product/service innovation, with the definition of innovation as the successful introduction of new customer value to markets. Organizational innovation is not often seen through that lens. But it should be. We can reframe the problem this way: does bad organizational structure subtract from the customer value experience? We can all think of ways in which it might do so: for example, poor customer service when customer-facing employees are not empowered, and layers of bureaucracy that impede responsiveness to customer needs. In those cases, organizational innovation could readily generate improved customer experiences and enhanced customer value.

Dr. Steiber had made organizational innovation her research focus for over two decades.

There are a small number of organizational innovators, and a lot of imitators. Google has been one of the originators of new organizational models.

Many organizational innovations are pre-packaged — LEAN is an example — and implementers are following someone else’s lead. Others are long drawn out evolutions of incremental improvement without a great burst of innovation.

One example of what Dr. Steiber calls “an entirely new animal” in organizational innovation can be found in the early years of Google, which she studied first hand — she was embedded in Google as an independent researcher. She observed a different management model than anything she had seen before anywhere in the world. From this research, Professor Steiber developed six new management principles, published in her book The Google Model, and summarized in our free PDF.

Silicon Valley companies employed and expanded on the Google Model.

Dr. Steiber studies the peers of Google in Silicon Valley and found that they all adopted the Google Model and its six principles, some more slowly than others. Interestingly, her research pointed to a DNA advantage for Silicon Valley going back to the gold rush: it was a location that attracted and was populated by innovative and entrepreneurial people who were capable of building businesses and new institutions from scratch in the late 19th Century, and in the 20th Century, it was the place where Information Technology emerged, was expanded and accelerated and first put to use in business. Knowledge and knowledge flow replaced management structures and face-to-face administration, including at early pioneers such as Hewlett-Packard.

Read “The HP Way”—an early Silicon Valley organizational innovation manifesto.

The six management principles Dr. Steiber describes are:

Dynamic capabilities.

Ability to integrate, develop, and reconfigure internal and external competencies in order to meet rapidly changing surroundings.

A continuously changing organization.

Instead of waiting and springing into action after needs become pressing, a company should ensure that its organization is permeated with a proactive approach to change.

A people-centric approach.

People-centric, focusing on the individual and liberating their innovative power and providing them with a setting in which they can express their creativity.

An ambidextrous organization.

Two different forms of organizational logic within the same organization: daily production, which works best with a conventional planning-and-control approach, and innovation, which requires greater freedom, flexibility, and a more open attitude toward experimentation. An ambidextrous organization must successfully handle and utilize the energy inherent in the contrast between these two forms of logic.

An open organization that networks with its surroundings.

Permeable boundaries and a constant and conscious exchange of information with the surroundings. Long-term survival requires that companies develop into more open networking systems.

A systems approach.

A holistic view of the system and understanding that the system can spontaneously develop new characteristics that can be difficult to predict. These new characteristics can be positive, negative or a combination of the two, creating a demand for additional measures, such as decreasing the fallout from unexpected negative system effects.

We highlighted a couple of these new management principles.

A continuously changing organization

The most successful companies are designed for constant renewal. They expect change all the time, and they lead its development. They aim for excellence on every dimension, applying three layers of expertise:

  1. Be proactive: Search for change internally and externally. Embrace it and practice it.
  2. Experimentation culture: Try every initiative assuming that it could be a new opportunity. Mobilize fast.
  3. Don’t follow. Take the lead, change the standard, be disruptive rather than disrupted, practice creative destruction.

These companies never lose external focus, continuously monitoring developments and competitors that could disrupt them, and constantly market-testing new initiatives. They have highly developed sensing capabilities.

An ambidextrous organization

Combining the two logics of flawless daily execution for known established businesses and exploratory experimentation seeking unknown new business innovation is an organizational breakthrough. It’s a systemic view of an organization combining different kinds of leadership for the two styles, different cultural signals, different milestones, different incentives, and different evaluation criteria. One system is designed for stability and one for change.

Rendanheyi: the most radically entrepreneurial organizational innovation.

True organizational innovation is very rare, but there is a new one that Professor Steiber described for E4B called Rendanheyi.

Rendanheyi is an organizational innovation for the network age in which a large company (Haier, the Chinese company that first instituted the model has 70,000 employees) splits itself into hundreds of microenterprises of averagely 60-70 people — but could be as low as 10 or so – each enterprise performing as its own entrepreneurial business with its own P&L, its own customer base, and control over hiring, budget, and distribution of profit, and over its own value-adding line of business. Defining characteristics include:

  • No bureaucracy, hierarchy, or pyramid forms of organization; no managers.
  • Employees are not referred to as such — everyone can be an entrepreneur is the mantra; they choose which microenterprise to work in. The focus is on the customer or end-user and not on pleasing the manager above. Incentive systems reward all employees for value creation, and all individual employees are constantly trying to understand how to increase value for customers. Increased value creation is rewarded, and so wealth generation is democratized.
  • Zero distance to the end-user: this is a Rendanheyi principle that brings the consumer or customer inside the microenterprise to co-create new value in the form of new products and services and solutions. Wholesalers and retailers, for example, can inject distance between a Haier micro-enterprise and its users; the enterprise might look to digital solutions to eliminate that distance. Generally, they seek to identify barriers to zero distance to the users and get rid of them.
  • End-user is a general term, so that those micro-enterprises that are serving other businesses rather than consumers can nevertheless practice the zero distance principle. For example, there may be a marketing micro-enterprise within Haier that serves a manufacturing micro-enterprise and a sales micro-enterprise. All can be aligned with zero distance and can work to fulfill end-users’ needs.
  • Paid-by-user. This principle focuses micro-enterprises on end-user value by emphasizing that all businesses live or die based on whether the end-user pays them for value perceived, or not. It’s Austrian customer sovereignty in action.

The general tendency in paid-by-user is away from transactional relationships to extended relationships across multiple purchases in ecosystems and via subscriptions and memberships. Relationships are an important focus, and the focus is on creating life-time users.

A sports team on the playing field is a sound analogy for Rendanheyi. There is no central control, each team member is collaborating and combining specialized skills for a team result.

There is only limited call for corporate functions at the center of the Rendanheyi organization. There is a role for developing and furthering vision that crosses multiple micro-enterprises, and for portfolio decision-making as to where to invest resources. Some orchestration functions can be assigned to the center — for example, furthering ecosystem thinking whereby micro-enterprises serving a consumer domain such as the kitchen can develop multiple services including information services and integration services across multiple appliances, tasks, and problems for the kitchen ecosystem.

The result of the Rendanheyi model is the animation of a living system, a superorganism. Rendanheyi provides a genuinely new and different perspective on entrepreneurial organization at scale.

Additional Resources

“Six Organizational Principles for Adaptive Entrepreneurial Models” (PDF): Download PDF

Rendanheyi Silicon Valley Center: Explore the Center

Menlo College Rendanheyi Silicon Valley Webinars: Menlo.edu/Webinars

Menlo College Digital Management Courses and Webinars: Executive.Menlo.edu

133. Ulrich Möller: The Video Game Industry Points to the Future of Organization Design

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Austrian economics has a lot to say about how to organize firms for maximum value generation. Austrian principles point to the delegation of entrepreneurial judgement to the front-line employees who interact directly with those who actually create value: users.

The military organization models of the twentieth century, involving command-and-control in hierarchical structures, are slow to change, and the management literature evidences an unwillingness to abandon the hierarchy. But there is a fast-growing industry that’s the locus of prodigious value generation where the hierarchy has already been abandoned and flat networks of distributed judgement are taking its place. Ulrich Möller is one of several Austrian economists who are studying the firms in the video game industry and demonstrating how their findings can bring positive organizational change to the rest of the business world.

Download The Episode Resource “The Future of Organization Design” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Organizational innovation has a long and successful track record in the video game industry.

A lot of value has been generated in the video game industry in a short period of time. Video games surpass movies and music in revenue. Without a long history of corporate hierarchies and bureaucracy to shed, firms in the industry embraced the organizational innovations of open source software, including anonymous collaboration among highly distributed self-organized teams, peer review systems, and agile processes.

In addition, the industry created its own laboratory for testing revolutionary organizational theories in virtual economies set in virtual worlds.

Valve is a company in the video game industry that took organizational innovation to its logical conclusion: the end of hierarchy.

Valve — a very successful, industry-leading company — pursued a value-generation logic to frame its approach to organization:

  • Creativity is our core resource — the most important skill in game development.
  • Creative employees are key to our capabilities.
  • Creative people are most productive when left to express their own creativity in their own way.
  • Hierarchy blocks creativity, as do planning and routine.
  • How do we design a company to attract and retain the sort of people who are able to take the boldest creative steps?

The answer? Let employees decide what to work on. Let them exercise entrepreneurial judgement. Let them, in effect, do both strategy and implementation. Give them all the decision rights. Let them identify customer preferences — since they know the customer best; let them decide how best to address those preferences; let them decide how to achieve competitive differentiation; let them allocate resources, choose costs, and manage profitability; let them control quality and decide when software is ready to ship.

Employees work in self-organizing teams, and are free to migrate from team to team, and free to change their roles. There are no fixed job descriptions.

In place of command-and-control, a few simple rules or constraints have emerged for the exercise of governance.

F.A. Hayek wrote about norms that emerge in social groups to shape behavior. These are not legislation, i.e., written formal restrictions. They are what he called rules, constraints that everyone accepts in the shared commitment to collaboration and the pursuit of the most favorable outcomes.

The most significant of these rules at Valve is the “Rule Of Three”, a simple agreement that at least three individuals must agree on the initiation of a new project, or on other major decision points. The emergent standard was that this is just enough to prevent maverick behavior, and a low enough number to facilitate agile action that’s not bureaucratically constrained.

Another rule or constraint goes by the name of Social Proof. This is a broader and looser peer review standard. If the original team wishes to recruit more members, they must persuade others of the value generating potential of the project (in competition with other projects in the firm); successfully doing so constitutes “social proof” of value.

Rules-based peer review process replaces management structure.

Conventional approaches to organizational design focus on structure. This might be command-and-control hierarchy, or structured networks, or strategic business units or functional departments. Valve abandoned structural thinking and replaced it with flow analysis. How can we attract the most creative people to our venture? How can we encourage the most productive flows of bold creative thinking? How can teams best assemble and collaborate for the most productive output? How can we integrate with the user community in the best way? How can the most value-generative projects attract the best resources?

These are all questions about flow. Austrian economists are distinctive in viewing capital as a flow rather than a structure, and this view holds true for human capital just as much as physical capital. Emergent rules for self-organizing human systems can perform all the managerial functions that were historically left to control structures.

Actionable Insight Summary

  • Design your organization for flow not structure.
  • Design to attract the most entrepreneurial people in the most entrepreneurial roles (self-selection).
  • Let them self-organize.
  • Let rules and value codes emerge.
  • Teams as business units.
  • Eliminate the boundaries between the firm and customers and other partners.

Additional Resources

“The Future of Organizational Design” — our E4B Knowledge Graphic (PDF): Download PDF

“Levels without Bosses? Entrepreneurship and Valve’s Organizational Design” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

“Entrepreneurship and Firm Strategy: Integrating Resources, Capabilities, and Judgment through an Austrian Framework” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

116. Alan Payne on a Fascinating History of Competing Business Models

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We can gain useful insights by winding business models back in time to see how they emerged and evolved. In the case of competing business models, we can analyze the different outcomes and perhaps assign some cause and effect analysis to interpret why one model variant performed better than another. How do we do that? Through the technique of entrepreneurial business history.

Alan Payne conducts just such a historical business model re-enactment in his excellent book, Built To Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust. It’s the dynamic story of two competing business models in one industry, a comparison of outcomes, and the resulting emergence of a new, third model.

Download The Episode Resource Consumer Value vs. Shareholder Value Models – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Business models are discovered by experimenting entrepreneurs.

The video cassette recorder (VCR) and playback device was a technological emergence in the 1970s. Movie studios saw the opportunity for new sales but worried about diverting revenues from the theater channel and therefore priced movies-on-cassette quite high from a consumer perspective (about $65). The experience of viewing movies at home was valuable to consumers but the exchange value was not aligned with the price. A few enterprising entrepreneurs discovered the rental option (don’t buy the cassette, rent it, and return it). The unit rental price emerged at around $3. The video rental business was born. Individual rental stores were profitable and some of the entrepreneurs started to open multiple stores and build small chains.

Capital-advantaged shareholder value-focused owners recognize emergent business models that are scalable.

Alan Payne’s story of business model evolution in the video rental industry describes a great leap in industry growth led by another kind of entrepreneur. Wayne Huizenga was an entrepreneur experienced in a certain kind of growth model. He had built Waste Management, a Fortune 500 company, from a one truck garbage collection route, largely through acquisition and subsequent expansion of local operators. He knew how to finance and run high growth expansion of a templated operating system. He bought Blockbuster for $18.5 million and sold it nine years later for $8.4 billion. That’s a huge amount of shareholder value generation.

Under Huizenga, the consumer value experience did not get better. It was frozen. We know that consumer experience is dynamic, not static; Huizenga’s Blockbuster let more and more consumers into a static experience (through geographical expansion) but was not generating new value for those or any other consumers.

More consumer-oriented businesses evolve more responsive business models.

In Alan’s story, HEB Grocery was a different kind of entrepreneurial business that approached consumer value in a different way. Alan describes the company as “obsessed with being the best” at meeting the ever-changing preferences of food shoppers. An effective grocery retailer must be highly responsive to changing consumer needs and adept at providing selection and value at low cost, with operational excellence in inventory management and customer service.

HEB decided they could offer video rental service in-store and brought their grocery operations skills to bear on designing a consumer-preferred experience. They tested different value propositions – Alan called their stores laboratories for the video rental experience – and let the consumer decide which were the best. They experimented with inventory (number of movies available), the in-store selection of new releases versus classics, different pricing schemes for different movies, different return dates for different products, and offering snacks alongside movies, among other variations. The result was a differently-tuned business model, one that built a more satisfied and loyal user base and generated more revenue and more profit per store than Blockbuster.

Business models are tools for economic exploration and advancement, so long as there is managerial and organizational flexibility to learn and improve.

When Alan Payne went to work for Blockbuster as an executive to run a panel of franchised stores, he transferred the learnings from the HEB video rental business model. He demonstrated that the model could be applied successfully in this new environment, achieving similar levels of growth, profitability and consumer satisfaction and loyalty in his panel of stores.

The issue for Blockbuster was not business model transferability, but the managerial, organizational and decision-making environment into which it was transferred. Blockbuster was a top-down hierarchy in which knowledge flowed one way — from the top of the hierarchy to the stores in the form of commands. When there was learning at the store level about new and better ways to organize, to manage, to operate, to please consumers and to make profit, it was impossible to transmit it upwards and share it. Blockbuster lost money and entered bankruptcy even while a significant number of stores in Alan’s franchised panel were operating profitably and were growing.

Alan eventually raised the money to buy the franchised stores from Blockbuster and operate them independently, which he did successfully and profitably for over 20 years. Blockbuster never was able to learn any of his techniques, nor modify its business model to the more successful version that was in plain sight.

Sometimes, an outsider from the industry comes along to seize the opportunity of the next business model evolution.

Alan makes it clear that technological change did not kill Blockbuster or the video rental model. When DVDs were introduced to (eventually) replace video cassettes, Alan’s franchised stores thrived by offering both side-by-side and thus appealing to two sets of consumers in one store.

Netflix was able to anticipate a future in which the digital data stored on DVDs became streaming data downloaded at home by consumers. This was not so much an act of prescience as one of exploration. The next new video-at-home experience began to emerge and Netflix captured much of the consumer value.

There is more value to be captured today because the consumer finds new experiential benefits in streaming, and the accompanying data analytics deliver insights that a consumer-centric firm like Netflix can utilize to further improve the experience. The same opportunity would have been available to Blockbuster, but their lack of business model agility and their failure to build learning channels from the consumer back to the corporation meant that they could not take it.

Additional Resources

Built To Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust: Buy it on Amazon

“Consumer Value vs. Shareholder Value Models” (PDF): Download PDF

25. Peter Klein on Organizational Designs

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Austrian economics has valuable and important things to say about organizing entrepreneurial firms.

Organization can make a crucial difference to entrepreneurial success. Ideas alone are not enough – execution is needed and the details of execution are important. The entrepreneur must design an organization for detailed, effective and efficient execution. Some entrepreneurs shy away, thinking it drudgery. That’s a mistake.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Organization is never static, but always dynamic. It’s not a structure, it’s a process. It’s your business model. It’s the collaboration that achieves the desired return on the entrepreneur’s imagination.

Austrian economics doesn’t prescribe a fixed way to “do” organization (unlike the rules- and framework-based approaches of consultants and organization gurus). It provides the right way to think about organization.

Organizational Designs

Organizational design starts with the entrepreneur’s ends in mind.

The purpose of the organization is to create customer value. Everything about the entrepreneurial firm is customer value, and so organization must be all about customer value. Elevate those elements that deliver customer value, and eliminate those that don’t. Everything that is not customer value, or gets in the way of creating customer value, or diverts resources from customer value, is waste and inefficiency.

Start with the best combination you can – in the current moment – of people and resources and capabilities to create the most customer value possible.

Delegate as much entrepreneurial judgement as you can – to people with the same customer value-creation focus as you, but greater expertise and knowledge in specific areas of the business.

Hire good people (or engage good contractors and vendors) who have the right skills and experience for a specific task or field, and then give them as much authority as possible. Don’t worry about over-delegating. Rather, worry about retaining too much control and becoming a limiting factor. Employees may find better ways to utilize an asset or expand a capability than you could have done in their place. They may show more ingenuity. Make sure your organization is consistent with the most productive use of available resources. It’s becoming more and more inefficient over time to exercise authority through control mechanisms. You can’t afford the transaction costs. By delegating, you lower your monitoring and management costs.

The owner-entrepreneur’s role is to design the rules of the game: making specifying decisions and determining how performance will be evaluated.

You retain ownership control by making what Peter Klein calls specifying decisions up-front: how you are going to run the business, tight or loose; defining in advance what discretion employees have, so that they don’t have to ask about every decision.

The second tool of control is defining the measurements of success and holding your team members to your metrics.

Outsource as much as possible.

The entrepreneur defines what resources and functions are crucial and proprietary to the business of customer value creation, and keeps control over them. Everything else can be outsourced – items like payroll services, accounting, transportation, legal, anything that constitutes overhead, and any tasks that are routinized. Just make sure there is no possible damage to the customer experience.

Employment contracts and compensation systems are tools of entrepreneurial control.

The specifying decisions can often be captured in the employment contract, where decision rights can be traded for benefits, and incentives can be defined to motivate the right levels of performance and the right feelings of participation and motivation. Go-getters and exceptionally creative people can be turned into “proxy-entrepreneurs”, exercising entrepreneurial judgement that is derived from the owner’s original judgment. There are no hard and fast rules about this trade-off, and it’s often a matter of gut feel. The savvy entrepreneur constructs a mental model of how the organization operates when it’s “just right” and makes adjustments when it’s not.

How you finance your business has major implications for your governance of your own company.

Venture capitalists want a major say, often a board seat and supervision of critical decisions. Lenders may have covenants that affect your governance decisions, and most definitely affect reporting. Friends and family will want to look over your shoulder, at minimum. When you are planning your financing, be sure to think about how it will affect your organization, and whether you want to accept the inevitable constraints.

In all cases, be ready to make adjustments to your organization design, your specifying decisions, your resources, and your metrics.

The entire point of flexible, dynamic organization is to facilitate change and adjustment on the fly. Plan to monitor continuously, and make changes whenever indicated. Never get locked in to a poorly functioning organization: change it.

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