Week 37, 2021 — Issue #169
Zero Distance Award: Customer Focus, Micro Enterprises, and Open Ecosystems
Each week: three ideas on the future of work. This week: three reasons why MAQE recieved the 2021 Zero Distance Award. Originally published in the WorkMatters newsletter on Sept 17, 2021.
MAQE has won the 2021 Zero Distance Award 🎉
Zero Distance is an award from the Business Ecosystem Alliance (BEA) that “identifies and celebrates the work of organizations throughout the world in eliminating the distance between their employees, their operations and their customers.”
The award recognizes our ongoing transformation efforts — including but not limited to our Rendenheyi (RDHY) implementation. Transformation is a long-term effort and we’re building atop a decade’s worth of experience adopting and adapting new and better ways of working, including:
1. Customer Focus
MAQE is a design-driven organization. We use Design Research (Needfinding) to uncover unmet customer needs, and we use Design Thinking (Co-Creation) to address them. And that’s important. But it’s not enough. Customer focus isn’t so much a practice as it’s a mindset. And so to deepen this commitment, we’re asking all teams — internal functions as well as external delivery teams — to track and continuously improve customer satisfaction.
2. Micro Enterprises
We’re in the process of unbundling our organization, going from a monolithic whole into something akin to a microservice architecture. This work started with mOS — our role-based operating system. But it continues with Ventures — a 4-step incubation program that we’ll use to turn employees into entrepreneurs that own and operate their own MicroEnterprise (ME) — each of which is narrowly focused on a particular set of user needs and value proposition.
3. Open Ecosystems
Until now, our transformation efforts have remained an internal affair. But in the long term, that will change. We’re committed to the idea of the ‘boundaryless organization’ and with it, the notion of the organization as an open ecosystem in which any number of firms — from inside and outside MAQE — come together to create, deliver, and, importantly, share in the value they create for customers — financial and otherwise.
This year, the BEA celebrates a total of eight organizations. In addition to MAQE, recipients also include Bosch Power Tools, Cipla Pharmaceuticals, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and others.
For more about all this, check out the Rendenheyi Open Talk 2021 that took place earlier this year on September 17 and 18, 2021.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
/Andreas
