BECOME® INSTITUTE

WHAT IF ALL THE PROBLEMS IN YOUR COMPANY ARE, IN FACT, ONE AND THE SAME?

THE UNDERLYING BUSINESS LOGIC BEHIND ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS

It may sound like an outrageous statement.

But scientific research shows that it is true.

That conclusion is based on more than 25 years of research by Eric Bartels, scientist, author and serial entrepreneur, into leaders, organizations and the radically different business logic of ultraperformers.

Leaders believe they are solving many different problems. In reality, they are often solving different manifestations of the same underlying problem.

THE PROBLEMS LEADERS KEEP TRYING TO SOLVE

Look at the agendas of leadership teams and at the global management consulting and business consulting industry surrounding them. Organizations continuously work on:

Business Transformation
Organizational Transformation
Strategy Execution
Organizational Alignment
Employee Engagement
Culture Change
Leadership Development
Innovation
Customer Centricity
Corporate Purpose
Agility
Productivity
Change Management

IN DAILY BUSINESS, THOSE LABELS LOOK LIKE THIS.

a strategy that looks right on paper but never gets executed, and growth that creates as much stress as stagnation;
a CEO or leadership team that remains the bottleneck for every important decision, while departments work past each other and blame one another;
leaders who cannot agree on priorities, while good people leave the moment something better comes along;
projects that consistently run late and over budget, and plans that end up in a drawer instead of becoming daily practice;
culture-change programs that quietly unravel once the intervention ends;
decisions that move slowly because no one feels the mandate to make them, while customer complaints and churn continue despite repeated interventions;
an organization trapped in fighting one fire after another, while compliance and regulation create ever more pressure;
technology and AI investments that never deliver what they promised, and numbers so unclear that nobody can say exactly where the margin is leaking.

Each appears to be a separate organizational challenge, with its own language, methodologies, specialists, programs and consultants.

What if these are not separate problems?

THEY ARE OFTEN SYMPTOMS

Organizations traditionally treat each problem on its own terms.

An engagement problem becomes an engagement program.

A culture problem becomes a culture-change program.

Strategy that is not being executed becomes a strategy-execution program.

Departments moving in different directions become an alignment program. Slowing innovation becomes an innovation program. Resistance becomes change management. A stagnating company becomes a transformation.

Again and again, organizations intervene in what they can see.

Eric Bartels’ research — nearly 700 leaders interviewed in depth and around 100 organizations studied from the inside — indicates that many of these problems are manifestations of the same underlying cause: the business logic on which the organization is built.

You can keep intervening in every symptom separately. Or you can change the system that keeps producing them.

YOUR COMPANY PROBABLY WORKS OUTSIDE-IN TOO

Eric Bartels’ research indicates that approximately 95% of conventional organizations still operate predominantly according to an outside-in business logic, inherited from the industrial age.

It is immediately recognizable:

MARKET / CUSTOMERS / COMPETITION / OPPORTUNITIES / TRENDS

↓

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

↓

STRATEGY

↓

ALIGN THE ORGANIZATION AND ITS PEOPLE

If that is how your company works, the implication is direct and worth stating explicitly.

When what an organization does is primarily determined by forces outside itself, people continuously have to be aligned, engaged, motivated, managed and changed to support choices they did not help create. Problems involving strategy execution, employee engagement, organizational alignment, culture, innovation, customer centricity, agility, productivity, organizational change and business transformation may therefore be symptoms generated or reinforced by that underlying logic.

And when the outside world changes again, the cycle repeats: new strategy, new structure, new culture program, new engagement initiative, new transformation, new consultants.

The symptoms change. The underlying logic does not.

THE ALTERNATIVE: BECOME®

The research into ultraperformers revealed a fundamentally different, inside-out business logic. They do not primarily ask what they should do to succeed.

They begin with a more fundamental question:

Who are we — and what can we uniquely become?

That is where the BECOME® architecture begins.

IDENTITY → STRATEGY → TACTICS → OPERATIONS

Identity is not added to the organization after the strategy has been written. Identity becomes the origin of Strategy. Strategy is translated into Tactics. Tactics are translated into Operations.

Everything originates from the same source, which creates coherence from the inside out — instead of continuously trying to create alignment after the strategic choices have already been made.

This is the distinction between the conventional MAKE Ontology and the BECOME® Ontology, and the foundation of the BECOME® Framework.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE PROBLEM YOU CAME HERE TO SOLVE?

BECOME® does not offer another engagement, culture, strategy-execution, innovation or change-management methodology. It changes the business logic from which many of these problems emerge. That has specific consequences.

STRATEGY EXECUTION

Strategy becomes easier to execute when it is no longer an externally imposed plan, but the logical consequence of who the organization is and what it can uniquely become.

People do not have to be convinced of a direction that was determined elsewhere. They recognize it as their own.

ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT

Alignment requires far less continuous intervention when Identity, Strategy, Tactics and Operations all originate from one coherent logic.

Coherence is created at the source, instead of being enforced afterwards across departments that were each given a different part of the answer.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Engagement changes fundamentally when people are no longer asked to execute somebody else’s answer, but participate in building the organization from its own Identity.

Engagement then becomes a consequence of the way the organization is built — not a program that has to compensate for the way it is built.

CULTURE CHANGE

Organizational culture is the visible behavior a business logic produces. Treating culture as an isolated intervention therefore often addresses the expression rather than the cause.

When the underlying logic becomes coherent, behavior increasingly follows the organization people are collectively building.

INNOVATION

When Identity is the origin of everything the organization does, innovation stops being an occasional initiative and becomes the continuous expression of what this organization uniquely wants to bring into the world.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

Customers remain essential. But the organization is not defined by the customer.

It creates exceptional value from what it uniquely can contribute to genuine customer needs — which is precisely what makes it distinctive rather than interchangeable.

CORPORATE PURPOSE

A Purpose cannot simply be invented.

The only Purpose that can truly drive an organization is one that originates from its intrinsic DNA and expresses the unique value the organization exists to bring into the world.

That is fundamentally different from adopting a social cause, formulating an aspirational marketing statement or adding a purpose to an already existing strategy.

In ultraperformers, Purpose originates from Identity. It becomes the starting point for a business logic and architecture in which Strategy, Tactics and Operations are all intrinsically aligned with that same Identity.

Purpose then stops being something the company says.

It becomes the reason the entire company works the way it does.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Organizational change requires a fundamentally different approach when people are not being persuaded to accept a predetermined future, but are enabled to participate in creating the organization itself.

PRODUCTIVITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY

A large part of the energy in conventional organizations is spent on repairing incoherence: realigning, re-explaining, re-deciding and re-launching.

When decisions can be made from a shared Identity, that friction decreases — which is where genuine agility and productivity come from.

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Changing strategy, structure, processes, technology or culture does not necessarily change the underlying business logic. Those changes can be valuable, but they improve individual parts while leaving the logic they originate from untouched.

That is why the same symptoms tend to return after a transformation: strategic confusion, weak innovation, cultural fragmentation, slow decision-making, disengaged employees and execution problems.

True business transformation can therefore require changing the logic from which all those elements originate. When Identity, Strategy, Tactics and Operations are architecturally integrated and intrinsically driven, a large proportion of those symptoms does not arise in the first place.

STOP SOLVING THE SYMPTOMS

If a company wants to improve employee engagement, organizational alignment, strategy execution, culture, innovation, customer centricity, change or transformation, BECOME® does not propose another isolated improvement program.

It proposes examining and changing the underlying business logic and architecture of the organization itself.

If you want to improve one part of your company, start with the whole.

Instead of continuously improving the symptoms, change the system that produces them.

LESS CONSULTANCY — NOT MORE

The objective of BECOME® Practice is not to make organizations dependent on consultants.

During the BECOME® Program, people from within the organization develop their own Identity, Strategy, Tactics and Operations, facilitated by trained BECOME® Practitioners. The objective is to create internal capability.

The best consultancy should ultimately reduce the need for consultancy.

THE BECOME® PROGRAM

If you recognize that your company operates predominantly outside-in, and you want to improve one or more of the organizational areas discussed on this page, the logical next step is not another isolated intervention.

The BECOME® Program enables an organization to make the transition from conventional outside-in business logic to the inside-out logic and architecture identified in ultraperformers.

DISCOVER THE BECOME® PROGRAM →