I've been lucky enough to work for, and with, many of the best in the business.  An incredibly organizationally effective company who pioneered the IT outsourcing market and made its living on operational efficiency.  The automotive team that launched the first connected car with OnStar twenty years ago. A high-tech giant who launched over 10,000 products, many of which claimed market leadership. The telecommunications provider that embraced the disruption of the iPhone.   Now, I work for Salesforce, a company Forbes recognized as #1 Most Innovative Companies List of 2017 and as one of the most innovative companies of the decade. 

Since I’ve joined, I’ve been intrigued by how Salesforce creates great Customer Experiences by working differently than many multi-billion dollar enterprises.  “Innovation permeates the everyday routine @Salesforce” as reported in Fortune The Future 50, when Fortune selected Salesforce as #1 on their new ranking of companies best positioned for growth. 

Innovation or Organizational Effectiveness?  Which end of the spectrum is best to achieve growth? Some industry stalwarts discount the innovators and the disruptors.  On the other hand, start-ups and cloud first companies can show disdain for the structure and governance processes that have made industry heavyweights.  The trick is finding the right balance between innovation which embraces ideation, experimentation, incubation and execution. Execution, particularly at scale, requires organizational effectiveness.  We work with our customers to help them move effectively at the speed of Salesforce innovation - three major product releases a year.  

Our methodology of harnessing and applying innovation is a structured but lean process that promotes organizational effectiveness.  We achieve this by co-creating an Operating Model designed for speed without introducing risk.  We identify behaviors, process or organizational constraints that slow down, inhibit or prevent customer valued outcomes.   We drive change in five key areas.

We apply product-aligned funding which shifts from a big bang annual budgeting cycle to more product-line empowerment.  The advancements in technology, the rate of change in the market, and the demands of the business can all evolve faster than most annual budgeting cycles can keep pace with.  A methodology that once catered to cautious investment no longer achieves that goal.  Fixed-base annual project funding approaches are slow to execute and often miss the mark at the end of a multi-year, multi-million dollar project. 

Product line funding shifts money much faster to empower your organization to be more responsive to the changing needs of the business.  This approach allocates investment to a product owner who aligns development needs to a strategic vision and creates a capability roadmap.  It's important to note that product line funding doesn't imply more is being spent, but rather, that investment is relentlessly focused on things the customer values, even when their priorities change.

We aspire to a continuous delivery model.  We apply an incremental approach to to Agile, and DevOps to take advantage of the speed of Salesforce platform innovations. We determine what needs to change in how you build, test, and deploy to quickly embrace new capability. Our most sophisticated customers are able to deploy value add on an as needed basis, some even multiple times a day, rather than a rigid release schedule, to increase quality and new capability delivery over monthly or quarterly bing bang approaches.  An aggressive release cadence transforms everything - improving your operating processes - and gives your business speed to real value.

We integrate a Digital Operating Model, the structure to do things right. The Digital Operating Model is the transformation of structure and culture to work differently as the digital and physical worlds collide.  We continue to learn together with our customers how to optimize structure.  There are many structures that work well, varying by the phase of your journey.  

We apply Design principles, and use creative tools to re-imagine the future, freeing ourselves from today's constraints. With many of our customers, we Embrace Change with Outcome Based Thinking to increase our focus on the end game. With others, we start with the Clayton Christensen Jobs to be Done Framework, which is a theory for better understanding customer behavior that helps us define a specific need or customer challenge to solve. Many of our largest enterprise customers find the Jobs to be Done framework effective to engage a broad spectrum of cross-functional stakeholders in the design process.  Design principles provide guardrails you set up in advance to help make decisions more quickly when you are executing at speed. For example, Salesforce values declarative application design, which means platform configuration will be leveraged first, rather than customization that may hinder agility in the future.

We value strategy over governance.  Once we establish our north star applying design principles and frameworks, we are relentlessly focused on achieving the most important outcomes.  Lean Governance implements strategies communicated in a way that provides guard rails to the design principles and maintains a center line to the strategic intent.  This approach helps people to make good decisions in a distributed way.  We regularly review and enhance governance activities, looking for those that add no value or inhibit us from delivering customer outcomes.  Valuing strategy creates a catalyst for change and puts in place Lean Governance to manage calculated risk at speed and scale. 

Innovation can, and must, coexist with organizational effectiveness.

Our processes for customer success are both innovative and organizationally effective.   

We seek to inspire business and technology collaboration, enable quicker decision making, provide clarity in the job to be done, and deliver real results directly aligned to strategic intent and customer valued outcomes.  Salesforce empowers our customers to effectively move at the speed business demands to achieve customer success.