Corporate Closets: Shifting Mindsets and Exploring Unconventional Methods for Success

By Francis KC Lim

Corporate Closets holds a vast array of information for the reader who is looking for practical and intelligent ways of taking his/her organization into the future. This book discusses the challenges at two levels: one while operating in this current environment of fast and constant change, increasing customer demands and disruptive competition; another while planning, implementing, and managing transformation toward high performance and growth to overcome them. Embracing the disciplines of learning organizations, this book explores the much-needed shifts in mind-sets, behaviors, and skills. Topics highlighted included corporate innovation, corporate agility, customer focus, team learning, and knowledge in worker engagement and collaboration. With a better understanding of the underlying complexities, disabilities, and difficulties, the author has developed a step-by-step guide to formulate action strategies to future-proof any organization, whether big or small. Francis KC Lim has taken two decades worth of experience in the corporate world and condensed it into an educational text to help others achieve sustainable change and performance for future success and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543743371

Francis KC Lim

Francis Lim graduated in 1995 with a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. For the next 20 years he worked in the domain of technology research and development, witnessing the transformative rise of the Internet age, also actively pursuing his passion for change implementation and management for organisational development and growth.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Francis KC Lim.

ISBN:                   Softcover                   978-1-5437-4336-4

                            eBook                         978-1-5437-4337-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1   Reflecting on Challenges Ahead

Chapter 2   Not Achieving the Desired Outcomes

Chapter 3   The Learning Framework to Creating Desired States

Chapter 4   Embracing True Customer Centricity

Chapter 5   Adopting Agility as a Mindset

Chapter 6   Implementing Innovation under Fire

Chapter 7   Forging Connected Collaboration

Chapter 8   Building Learning Teams

Chapter 9   Engaging the Knowledge Worker

Chapter 10   Leading and Sustaining the Success

Resources

Dedication

To my grandmother, parents Ronald and Lily, brother Laurence, and friends who encouraged and tracked my progress along this journey, and to all the folks out there who love the messiness of organisations and aspire to bring learning and mastery to the people in them to achieve purposeful corporate lives.

Introduction

A commonly heard phrase is, ‘We need a mindset change,’ and although it is true, it is also becoming a cliché. How do we change our mindset? What do we change it to? How well do we know our current mindset and that of our teams and customers? Mindsets can be observed tangibly through language, conversation dynamics, actions, decisions and reactions to situations, etc. Ironically, we shouldn’t blame ourselves too much for having today’s mindsets because they could have been solutions to our yesterday’s problems. But, can we simply continue with your current ways of thinking, feeling and doing? Why not? How do we know they are inappropriate?

Mindsets are high leverage to create change, and they are good places to start when desiring change. However, knowing the new mindset needed is something else entirely. How will we know that the new mindset will be the one needed to solve our problems? Well, the only sure-fire way of knowing is to try them out. But we also need to know how to change, ensuring that all the key issues are covered, assessing the extent of the change needed for the entire organisation.

Mindset change takes time and effort, but it pays off when it is executed properly and deliberately and outcomes sprout and grow. A fundamental notion behind such an undertaking, is learning, which, incidentally is also the first guiding character of Confucius’ Analects – 37486.png (learning).

Chapter 1

Reflecting on Challenges Ahead

I started my corporate life in 1995 after leaving university, so I have witnessed the evolution of information technology and the rise of the Internet. I remember being amazed at the Netscape World Wide Web. The corporate landscape has also seen dramatic changes in the past two decades. In my years of working with both local and overseas companies, may they be public or commercial sectors, small, medium or large enterprises, it is a common lament among executives that corporate business is not the same anymore. Everything seems to have changed and is still consistently changing. Meeting customer expectations and maintaining their loyalty, managing the new generation worker, staying ahead of competitors who offer cheaper production or more options, the need to constantly invent and reinvent offerings in order to stay competitive, etc. are really stress-inducing challenges, especially if you are the CEO. It is characterised by dynamism, consistent change, unpredictability, and information/data explosion, which, if unfiltered, will simply cause overload. This is the new reality, it will not go away, it will only become more intense.

I came across Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler’s (KPMG) Global Transformation Study 2016, which reported that organisations were realising that they would need to transform themselves if they wanted to keep up with these changing and disruptive times. Their study indicated that organisations found it challenging to sustain their success for various reasons, with fewer than half (47%) of the executives who took part expressing confidence in sustainable value from business transformations. The KPMG study raised several salient observations that resonated with my own corporate experiences. It talked about the evolving nature of the customer, the