tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8662858581791799812.post5575690477543735147..comments2010-07-24T23:32:02.656+01:00Oscar Berghttps://profiles.google.com/109479022314471643787noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8662858581791799812.post-44419156943946619082008-01-30T16:40:00.000+01:002008-01-30T16:40:00.000+01:00Hi Tom,<BR/><BR/>I'd say that the core of their success is their focus on their human capital - all the people who make it all possible. Their employees are their key to success and they know it very well. In is not just about recruiting and retaining the right people, but also about creating a sense of belonging and a common vision that is not just words but actually mean something. And making sure that these share the same vision and core values that make people want to help each other, such as simplicity and honesty. If you dig a lot deeper than that and analyze organizational structures, processes and systems, you will find that IKEA is not much more different than other companies. All too often, we think that we can "engineer" or "architect" an organization to make it succesful. Improve it, yes. But the foundation must be there. It always comes down to the people that have gotten together to achieve something together.Oscar Berghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13364324951599654650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8662858581791799812.post-29924485470342798172008-01-30T15:50:00.000+01:002008-01-30T15:50:00.000+01:00I'd argue that the core of the success is subtly different. Good knowledge-sharing is extremely important, yes; but here it's a more a <I>symptom</I> than a direct cause of IKEA's success. As you imply but don't actually state, anyone who tries to just copy the knowledge-sharing, without the culture that makes that knowledge-sharing not just possible but desirable, is going to get nowhere, yet have no means to understand what's going wrong.<BR/><BR/>The vision and values are extremely important also; but again they <I>in themselves</I> are not 'the key'. The real key to how this happens is how all threads are <I>integrated</I> into a single whole - not how any one part works, but how they all work together.<BR/><BR/>That integration is necessarily different for every enterprise, since each is inherently unique in some way. But at a slightly more abstract level, the overall map of how everything ties together is <I>not</I> unique - in fact it's clearly identifiable and measurable, in terms of 'ability to do work' in the broadest sense of 'work'. And from the work I've been doing for the past few years, that metric of 'integration' can be correlated directly with long-term performance (or lack of it) for commercial organisations.<BR/><BR/>(Some years back I developed an online tool to elicit this metric in as little as fifteen minutes - see <A HREF="http://www.tetradian.com/semper" REL="nofollow">www.tetradian.com/semper</A>, if you're interested.)<BR/><BR/>Anyone who tries to copy IKEA's business-model in a mechanical way, item-by-item, is setting themselves up for disappointment. They'll do better trying to copy key components such as knowledge-sharing; they'll do better still if they try to recreate (but <I>not</I> simply copy) IKEA's culture. But to make it really work, they need to understand far more how these elements all weave together. Hence 'Enterprise 2.0' and the like.TomGweblog.tomgraves.eunoreply@blogger.com