If it’s not broken do you still need to fix it?

It has to be more than a coincidence that transformation is occupying so many businesses at the moment. A company doesn’t spontaneously decide that it needs to question everything it thinks and does. Indeed, a business doesn’t necessarily have to be broken to decide it needs to transform. When Auckland Council was formed from the various district councils in 2010, the requirement to transform was always the intent and was part of the Royal Commission of Inquiry report highlighting the need for change. But the business took the view that they needed to embed the new amalgamated entity first before embarking on a transformation journey because there was a necessary baseline to ensure ‘continuity of services’ – that is, keeping the lights on while the integration was taking place. And although the committed and devoted staff were continuing to serve the community and no-one was faced with a broken organisation, there was a recognition that for Auckland Council to be fit for purpose in the future of a modern, growing diverse Auckland and to align with changing expectations of the role of institutions in society, it would need to transform at an enterprise wide level to become a customer-centric organisation.

Looking outside of New Zealand to the global stage, when Satya Nadella took over as CEO at Microsoft, he took the helm of a very successful organisation, not a sinking ship. The business believed in its own success demonstrated by the internal mindset which rewarded being smart and it was everyone’s goal to be the smartest person in the room. Who would want to transform that? Nadella did. Why? Because he believed that to secure Microsoft’s future they had to work out ‘why the world would be less good’ if Microsoft disappeared in the light of a growing number of examples of business that seemed unassailable simply fading away and being replaced by something that was more relevant. The Microsoft ‘success’ mindset has been transformed into a ‘growth mindset’ and from a ‘know it all’ culture to a ‘learn it all’ culture. Curiosity is rewarded above smart.

Marketing was a key part of the Microsoft transformation process. Chris Capossola, CMO of Microsoft, describes how his biggest challenge was to get people to understand why they needed to care about transforming Microsoft when it was already a successful company so that the same story would be running through every employee’s head.