From Growth to Corporate Hacking!!
It has been a while since I took the time to write a new paper, simply because I have been busy over my head with little time for writing and exploring new ventures. In those two years it almost took me to start writing again, I have seen a number of new concepts emerge, some of the concepts I had delt with became mainstream (internal Social networks, Serious Gaming, Workspace Digitalization), while some are still below the radar.
One of the new business concepts (or role descriptions) includes the so called 'Growth Hacker', which is just another way to say: plug some data analytic tools onto your systems, and see if you can enhance your processes by adapting them given the information you retrieve. This in order to be more efficient and focused in your digital acquisitions.
But is there a life after growth hacking? What if you are in a company where you have already plugged your analytics, performed your growth hacking, and are basically on the right business track? How can you still enhance your global performance (and not only your sales efficiency), and moreover are there any other resources you can still leverage on?
Moreover, once you have determined your course of action to maximize efficiency in your digital processes, how do you support them? How do you make sure that people underlying those processes are also efficient, and allow you to leverage your data? In other words, can one ripe the benefits of growth hacking without more than setting-up the right analytics tools?
Efficiency (and therefore global performance) is a matter of adaptation of your organization to your business objectives. If you have determined that you should change, say your on-boarding process to maximize client engagement on your solution, you need to make sure that your teams are able to follow on this new way of doing. Are they trained? Do they know what their new role will require? If your people are not trained to enforce new methodologies or processes, then you will fall short of succeeding. Where Growth Hacking is about technology, Corporate hacking is about companies’ topography, about their organizational shape, and how to make them more efficient.
It is in essence adapting the shape of the company in order to fulfill its objectives. It is as much about organizational growth, adaptation of existing processes or people development, as it is about revenue growth. It is about tweaking the organization and shaping it into a more adapted system. But not all of it! It is not about Change or Transformation, rather about adaptation, about shifting parts of the organization towards new goals in order to create a tipping moment where this new organizational behavior will take hold on the rest of the company.
It is done by setting-up dedicated units, departments, new rules of engagement; by setting-up a transformation program which includes a number of innovative initiatives which aim at renewing the way things are done; by enforcing new management rules, new tools and usages, new postures and new mind-sets.
But where does the hacking lie as this looks a lot like any other transformation program?
It lies in the way change or transformation is addressed. First it needs to be clearly correlated to a gain in operational efficiency, business development, client service, or overall performance. But the objective should not merely be to adapt to new technologies and environments in a reactive mode, but more being proactive about how we want to evolve and shape our organization.
Second, it should be enforced at a local level first, in pilot mode for testing, before being generalized to the whole organization. It should leverage on change agents and people heavily involved in the evolution of the organization efficiency, to set a new standard for operational performance. In a way, where growth Hacking evolves Digital Marketing towards a greater efficiency of the delivered message, and better product definition for customer satisfaction, Corporate Hacking ensures the best possible matching between business objectives, and organizational performance. It might consider the implementation of new production tools, new management practices, dedicated units or simply an evolution of already quite efficient processes. A good example which would fall under this category is Zappos, which completely reinvented its internal organization.
Are you ready to hack your own organization to make it better??
