{"id":1228,"date":"2018-08-21T00:25:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T00:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2018-08-21T00:34:31","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T00:34:31","slug":"evolutionary-cogs-vs-operational-cogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/rwc-blog\/evolutionary-cogs-vs-operational-cogs\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolutionary Cogs vs Operational Cogs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">In mid-large companies in particular, internal stakeholders who are not \u201cat the helm steering the ship\u201d often become frustrated at the lack of forward movement of the company.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Sometimes this perception is actually a close reflection of the reality of the actual situation. I have found that there are a few key reasons for a company slowing-down or stagnating on its evolutionary course:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">The owners are so entwined in the day-to-day running of the business, that they have little-no time to work \u201con\u201d it (i.e. setting direction\/ exploring new opportunities for business development\/ make timely governance decisions, etc).<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">There is no written Strategic Plan in place to evolve the business in any particular direction, or\u00a0 if there is such a plan in place then it either hasn\u2019t won the buy-in (support) from internal\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 stakeholders (largely because they haven\u2019t been included in its formation) and\/ or it hasn\u2019t\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 been shared &#8211; within the comfort of the owner to disclose particular contents \u2013 with relevant\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 stakeholders.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Key internal stakeholders feel disenfranchised from the business.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">When I have worked alongside business owners who feel that they\u2019ve \u201ccome unstuck\u201d or are frustrated at feeling like they can\u2019t influence any significant momentum in their business, the first question that I ask is \u201chow many days each week are you working <strong>on<\/strong> your business and not in it ?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">The answers that spring from that initial pivotal question quickly tell me that there is insufficient capacity within the owner(s) to work in <u>both<\/u> the management realm and the governance realm within their business. In short, they are working as \u201cOperational Cogs\u201d in their business \u2013 and not as \u201cEvolutionary Cogs\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">It is my view that if a business owner is serious\/ genuine about wanting to firmly occupy the \u201cgovernance seat\u201d (become a major \u201cEvolutionary Cog\u201d) in their business, then they should be doing everything in their power to successively relinquish as many of the day-to-day operational functions that they are involved with as they can \u2013 and empower suitably qualified and experienced employees to take care of these instead.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Quality, well-reasoned <u>governance<\/u> decisions made on a timely basis play a huge part in determining the speed at which an organization evolves. The more that \u201cEvolutionary Cogs\u201d are jammed-up dealing with matters which really \u201cOperational Cogs\u201d should be dealing with, the less opportunity there is for such governance decisions to be made\u2026and so the \u201cship\u201d slows down, and sometimes stops altogether.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In mid-large companies in particular, internal stakeholders who are not \u201cat the helm steering the ship\u201d often become frustrated at the lack of forward movement of the company. Sometimes this perception is actually a close reflection of the reality of the actual situation. I have found that there are a few key reasons for a company slowing-down or stagnating on its evolutionary course: The owners are so entwined in the day-to-day running of the business, that they have little-no time&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1232,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realworldconsulting.kiwi\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}