Deutsch20 years ago, in autumn 1997, I adventured into independency!
It fills me with gratefulness to look back on this adventurous journey, which connected me with extraordinary people, with challenging projects and immense valuable experiences, personal and business-wise.
It all started with Organisational Development. At that time, OD-Consultants were an exotic consulting species, and “Corporate Culture” almost foreign words in business.
To take a pioneering role and to bring valuable innovative concepts and methods into business is, and was always, my identity as consultant.
For example:
- Involve the concerned, a core concept of OD: from the beginning on, I involved the people into the change with large group interventions, and let them work on the core themes in a self-organised way (“Open Space Technology”).
- Going to the roots of what determines the success of an organisation, the “genetic code”, the dominant logic, the values and attitudes, or – in short – the corporate culture.
Today, this is mainstream. In the “Agile Leadership Day”, a conference with 800 participants in Zurich, every speaker spoke about corporate culture as a key success factor, and about self-organising networks, because only these are able to absorb complexity and to successfully deal with the VUCA world (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).
Good, and which is now my pioneering theme?
The business world stands just at the beginning of the VUCA challenge, and digitalization is just getting started. This leads to the key question of every business today: how do we become more adaptive, innovative, fast, resilient, agile?
The classical power hierarchy proves itself as too inert, too less intelligent, to slow, to rigid, too demotivating. Power hierarchy cannot process the external networking and complexity.
The necessary change is so profound, that it is not enough to bring some methods from the complex IT world like SCRUM et.al. into the management system. What is needed is a new organisational operating system.
Next Generation Organisation is the pioneering theme which I’m now bringing with great passion into the business world, together with my partners. In purpose driven organisations people get free space for high performance and potential unfolding in clearly defined areas of responsibility. They do what they are talented and motivated to do, and they take full responsibility for their value contribution towards the customer and their own working structure.
It’s not the destination that counts – it is he journey; and after 20 years of transformation, I feel our journey has just begun! We took the 20-years “birthday” as an opportunity to get closer to you with our new homepage. Please, be welcomed to browse it, and stay tuned, because we will regularly post ideas and resources we find inspiring.
With the domain .swiss we explicitly commit to the Swiss Values of quality, trust, innovation, performance, self-responsibility, and openness.
With great appreciation and gratitude für for all the valuable connections, and looking forward to meet you personally.
October 2017, Ralph Höfliger
