Why your people need to mesh for your business to move
Identifying ideal mesh points within your organization is vital to strategic execution.

Geoff Wilson
Your organization is the gearbox of your strategy. It’s the structure through which the energy of people and ideas gets channeled toward the strategic intent of the company’s leadership team. An effective organization structure is priceless. It fosters contact and collaboration among people who are best positioned to capture opportunity and manage risk en route to delivering the company’s mission.
But if the organization is the gearbox, a leader’s ability to fine tune the meshing of the gears within the box becomes a key determinant of whether strategy can be executed at all. Perhaps your strategy calls for an operation to be migrated from one geography to another—maybe to capture a cost advantage or to better serve a customer.
Such a move typically requires many disparate parts of a company to mesh with one another in ways that aren’t always natural.
How so? Imagine that the operation’s leaders are focused on delivering on cost and inventory performance at the start and end of the move. Then, imagine that the very act of moving will naturally impact production costs (as one facility is ramped down and another is ramped up) and inventory levels (as inventory is built up on one side for the move, and built on the other to achieve future service levels).
What is likely to happen if the operational leaders aren’t appropriately meshed with strategic and financial leaders to reset goals and expectations? Chaos, that’s what. Customer service suffers, transitions from the one location to another take twice as long (as cost levels are over-managed), and nearly everyone wonders why this was so darn hard.
It’s necessary during times of strategic change to over-invest in organizational mesh points that ensure ideas and energy are correctly driven. These can often be artificial and temporary—program management offices provide this function for large-change programs. But sometimes, strategic organization mesh points simply need to be matters of daily business. The emergence of sales and operational-planning processes and meetings the world over reflects the value of strategic mesh points in organizations.
Maybe you have a strategy that requires an unnatural coordination across your sales and product development teams. Perhaps your strategy requires your supply chain to interact differently with your marketing team. It’s important to know this.
Be sure to consider where your organization needs to mesh in order to achieve the change you’re seeking.
What do you think?
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