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Is the hierarchical management mode still suitable for the challenges of the modern economy? Can business leaders compete in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the age of the intelligent connected stakeholder (employees, partners, customers, and communities) without adopting a beginner's mindset that fully recognizes the new currencies of the digital economy -- speed, personalization, scale, and intelligence?
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More importantly, can companies compete in a hyper-connected, knowledge-sharing economy without support from a business ecosystem? There is mindset shift that is required to drive business transformation, and it starts with understanding the importance of building business ecosystems.
Mindset Shifts for Organization Transformation
To better understand how companies can build business ecosystems, I spoke with Henry King and Steve Wilt, two extraordinary innovation and transformation leaders at Salesforce. King and Wilt are guiding complex enterprise digital transformation projects with a guiding principle that transforming relationships with customers, talent, partners, and communities is the path to business growth in the digital age. Building ecosystems needs to be a central consideration in any relationship transformation strategy.
Success in the digital era will come from the connected and collaborative efforts of business ecosystems more than from the controlled efforts of individual companies. To stay competitive and relevant, companies need to transform their relationships with their various partners and providers to become highly functional ecosystems.
Companies have, of course, always been part of value chains, with their own supply and channel partners, but have maintained a worldview based around themselves as individual and independent business entities. Table 1 shows the main differences between company and ecosystem world views:
Ecosystem members enjoy relationships that are more interwoven, dynamic, collaborative, and inclusive. They work together to build solutions that empower and facilitate mutual success, even when they may have little or no control, or ownership of the solutions. This is true whether those solutions are open, like Linux for example, or proprietary.
For example, the million plus members of the Salesforce Success Community, including developers, administrators, and integrators, as well as business users from hundreds of different companies, work tirelessly to make the company's CRM platform as effective as possible for everyone who uses it. They answer 4,000 platform-related questions each month -- in a traditional company, the job of a call center -- develop and share apps on the AppExchange, make significant contributions to the three annual releases, and invest their own time in training other community members. In turn, their contributions increase their own reputation and value in the Salesforce economy, enhancing their career prospects both within and beyond their current employer and role.
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This interdependency and mutual value of Salesforce and its entire business ecosystem, known affectionately as the Ohana (the Hawaiian word for "family"), cannot be overstated. While the company itself is estimated to reach $20 billion in revenues by 2022, it is also expected to account for an estimated $859 billion in GDP impact and an estimated 3.3 million Salesforce-related jobs in the same timeline.
The Salesforce Economy
Ultimately of course, the reason to care is the business success that ecosystem companies enjoy. A recent report by McKinsey makes that very clear:
"With vast scale from placing customers at the center of their digital activity, ecosystem leaders have captured value that was difficult to imagine a decade ago. Seven of the top 12 largest companies by market capitalization--Alibaba, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent--are ecosystem players."
Building an ecosystem doesn't just happen. It takes understanding, intentionality, and patience. From our own innovation and transformation experience, here are five foundational practices to help managers set initial conditions for their own ecosystem success:
Ecosystems are redefining core business practices. For many leaders these dynamic and loosely-controlled, symbiotic communities are challenging long-held institutional habits and orthodoxies that were once the foundations for success but are now holding businesses back.
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Shifting existing mindsets and working in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways is never easy but needs to be embraced by the senior leaders of companies and spread throughout the company all the way to frontline employees. Success in building a vibrant business ecosystem will be the difference between prospering and being marginalized in the digital economy.
This article was co-authored by Henry King and Steve Wilt, innovation and transformation leaders at Salesforce.
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