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Building Your Cross-Functional Excellence Knowing how to transform stand-alone technologies, products and services into value-rich solutions |
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By Vadim Kotelnikov, Founder, The first-ever BUSINESS e-COACH for Innovative Leaders, 1000ventures.com
"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that" - John Stuart Mill
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Why Do You Need Cross-Functional Excellence? Although innovation is driven by technology, required competence extends beyond technical know-how. In the new knowledge economy and knowledge-based enterprises, systemic innovative solutions arise from complex interactions between many individuals, organizations and environmental factors. The boundaries between products and services fade rapidly too. If you wish to be a market leader today, you must be able to integrate in a balanced way different types of know-how that would transform stand-alone technologies, products and services into a seamless, value-rich solution. Learn Playing More Than One Note If you learn not one, but the whole spectrum of notes, you will not have to play mono-tone music all the time. Your will discover much more opportunities and, by engaging your lateral thinking, self-motivation, and systems thinking arts and skills, create great symphonies and improvise whenever necessary. Cross-Functional Excellence for Leading Organizations We all start our carriers as specialists - men and women with narrow corridors of functional expertise. The goal of specialists is to optimize individual effort. Technologists want to design the best products. Salespeople want to develop the most effective marketing strategies... and on and on. But "to raise to the ranks of senior management, you must forgo this quest for personal perfection, seeking instead to balance the skills and capabilities of the specialists working for you."1 You need to apply the balanced business systems approach and consider your business as a system of interrelated factors of strategy, owners, investors, management, workers, finance, processes, products, suppliers, customers, and competitors. Strategic Cross-Functional Management Strategic cross-functional management is central to capitalizing on functional excellence, and in order for functional specialists to make the greatest possible contribution, they must take a broader view of their functions and understand how they fit into the web of the organizational processes and, ultimately, into the overall strategy... More Cross-functional Excellence for Driving Radical Innovation "Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony!".3 While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects. Individuals who are likely to excel in a radical innovation project, besides having superior technical capabilities, should be goal-oriented, broadly educated, creative, extremely bright, not afraid to be different, integrative, flexible, passionate, entrepreneurial, aggressive, eager to learn business, able to take risks, and inquisitive.3 Cross-functional Excellence for Managing Technology In the new era of systemic innovation, cross-functional technology managers are in high demand. In the Silicon Valley, for instance, many companies found that when they moved to a flatter organization, they had plenty of top-flight technologists but too few technology managers. "These managers are skilled technologists who also value the contribution from other functions, and who play an active role integrating these functions during the innovation process".2 Cross-functional Excellence for Managing Knowledge The explosion of knowledge growth, combined with its rapid distribution, makes it difficult to stay on top of the available knowledge in any industry. Thus, a global knowledge economy rewards not only creators of new knowledge but also those who can identify and integrate knowledge effectively.2 Case in Point: Nurturing Cross-Functional Experts at Hewlett-Packard Most companies tend to recruit, train and promote people within functional corridors. But Hewlett-Packard (HP) breaks the walls, creating a carrier network that begins with the recruitment of diverse people in terms of their skills and personality and then promotes horizontally, as well as vertically throughout the company. "Typically, HP employees move through four to six functional areas in the course of their carriers. This creates broad knowledge of the company and fosters the kind of teamwork other companies covet".1 When it comes time to promote, managers don't look who is next down the carrier line, they look for the best people. Neither employees should follow a pre-defined path to a particular post, nor need they to get a bigger title to be given new responsibility. Case in Point: Ten3 Business e-Coach This new-to-the-world Ten3 Business e-Coach is a typical Russian creation. No corporation can develop and upgrade continuously such an innovative product unless they have passionate, creative, disruptive, cross-functionally excellent, and systemically thinking individuals, as Russians are, in their teams. Read what Western innovation practitioners say about the Ten3 Business e-Coach:
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Bibliography:
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"Extreme Management", Mark Stevens, 2001
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"Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer, 1998
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"Radical Innovation", Harvard Business School, 2000
