Chapter 3How Things Work Today

Most people have become accustomed to the concepts of corporate cultures, behaviors, attitudes, and perspectives as beneficial forces that help shape and form the way companies operate. This “operating model” is the shared understanding of how things get done that propels your organization, helps it achieve results, and ensures that resources, people, and inputs are consumed effectively. While BAU is beneficial—a reliable, trusted, universally accepted way of doing business—it is also a sleeping tiger, becoming a man-eater when those methods and processes are threatened. And as we’ve seen, innovation threatens BAU more than almost any other initiative.

In most situations, the operating model is not a man-eating ...

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