Home is the New Enterprise

Part 1

In his 1982 best-seller “In Search of Excellence,” management guru Tom Peters popularized the business practice of “management by wandering around,” familiarly known as MBWA.

MBWA, which quickly became a best practice, is an approach where managers spend a portion of their day “wandering”  around the office or manufacturing plant, listening to employees’ ideas and concerns, and then making changes where applicable to improve productivity, morale and performance.

The Covid 19 pandemic has made MBWA pretty much impossible.   My GC colleague Quentin Clark said it best – ‘home is the new enterprise.’

With a large percentage  of the US labor force working from home, employers now face significant and unforeseen management challenges. Even companies that had  comprehensive pandemic contingency plans did not contemplate a scenario in which all employees would be working from home indefinitely.

This  “new normal” presents unique challenges - and yes opportunities as well -  for all businesses. These challenges/opportunities include: maintaining a healthy company culture; equipping and motivating individuals and teams to sustain high levels of performance and productivity; and, very importantly, ensuring the highest levels of cybersecurity to prevent costly information leaks and breaches that could cripple your business.

Now that every business function is being carried out remotely - not just sales and field service functions which have been remote  for many years - innovative management, and motivation approaches in these critical areas are imperative. They will be necessary to survive and to thrive.

So, how does a manager perform the equivalent of ‘walking around’ in the “Home is the New Enterprise” era?

In a series of articles over the next few weeks I’ll explore Culture, Productivity and Security strategies and tactics to help get through the current crisis as well as look at ways  to plan effectively for the post-Covid future in which employees’ working from home will be the norm.

CULTURE

Renowned management consultant and author Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He was 100% right.

As CEO of Black Duck Software, I oversaw a complete transformation of the company from the time I took over as CEO in 2013 to Black Duck’s $565M acquisition by Synopsys, Inc. in 2017. Of all the changes we made in the turnaround, repositioning the company to focus on open source application security and revamping our go-to-market strategy, the most important t change we made was transitioning from a  laissez faire  culture to a culture of ownership, high performance and transparency at every level of the organization.

 There is no way I and our team could have completed this cultural transformation if the entire company was working remotely.

Absolutely no way.

Today I would have to find a way or make one.  So how should a company think about sustaining  and nurturing a strong, healthy culture while everyone works from home?  What tools and technologies  are needed? We’re going to discuss some creative ways to help companies and their employees strike the right  work-life balance when work life and home life are permanently intertwined.

PRODUCTIVITY

Similarly, how can finance, marketing, operations, human resources and other teams remain highly productive working remotely? These teams have relied on in person communication and collaboration. How do managers ensure that teams can stay connected  and collaborate effectively?  How should we measure productivity? This is a Home is the New Enterprise issue that we will explore in detail.

SECURITY

Working from home effectively is not just about a fast-secure internet connection and a good user experience. Both are important but security is paramount.

This is an area of acute risk in the current work from home environment because of the overall increase  in attack surfaces hackers can exploit. If data breaches were bad and getting worse while employees were mostly working from their offices, how bad could it get when everyone works from home?

There are good security practices to follow in work from home situations and tools available to help.

I look forward to getting into the topics in detail and inspire a lively conversation.

STAY TUNED.