Leadership Experience, Essay Example

This setting suggests that opportunities represent themselves from changes occurring due to customer expectations and needs, actions of competitors, economic conditions and technology. Adaptation would mean to involve searching for methods of acquiring the materials and resources that are needed and taking measures to ensure sale of products has increased and customer service. Some aspects that depict adaptation include growth in sales, market share, satisfaction to customer, and the number of sales from repeat customer. Innovation entails product improvements, processes and services. New product sales or services’ percentage, new products and or services’ number significance of research discoveries and number are just but some of the indicators.

There comes a time when an organization will have to perish or adapt. Some organizations do not take major changes in a sequence while others take it occasionally. When people say that organizations should be creative and innovative, adapting to the change of circumstances has also become more of a platitude on the literature on leadership and acknowledgement of the significance of innovation.

In enhancing an organization’s adaptation, innovation is a very critical aspect, but it is only the way to the end and not the expected end. Many organizations are of the view that innovation is based on improving products and services, but measures to facilitate and encourage innovation might in a way make an improvement another pre-determinant of an organization’s performance. Operational procedures may be enhanced to be more reliable and efficient by copying some of the best practises being performed by other organizations, putting new procedures to practise, acquiring new talents and making reviews on work process to acknowledge potential improvements. Improvements can be made on human relations by innovating new ways through tying together member creativity, motivation and skills of members being enhanced, cooperative effort being facilitated, and enhance loyalty to the organization.

Dell computers has some of the good examples for successful adaptation, that has been able to perform some modifications in its business model with respect to the external environmental changes while still working on influence to core competencies. Even though Dell stays ahead of its rival by putting more attention on process improvement, it is unlikely to propel the kind of growth in revenue the stock market expects of the company. They are faced with a mature market for PC and so they have made varieties from their product to networking switches, printers and handheld computers. They have even expounded on their commodities that are semi customized to include professional and computing services.

When leaders are not up to the task in responding appropriately to opportunities presented by external environment and threats; the company’s performance will suffer. Some of Hamel’s concepts of community of purpose are as follows: Accountability and Freedom-there is choosing of products by individuals, which will enhance the betterment of each department. Whole Foods have the both authorities over freedom to do the right thing for their target customer or the motive to do the right thing in order to gain profits. Trust-trust is accompanied with employee accountability and freedom. When much of the authority is given to associates, the requirement for top management is to trust them to do the correct thing for the corporate. Equity-trust usually comes in form of equity with employee. The company rather than feeling like a hierarchy, it feels more of a community. Hamel also continued by saying Whole Foods were struggling to offer a working together community to create value for its people.Purpose-an organization should be able to have a common cause as a whole. Many of the associates who are employees at Whole Foods is a show of their own choices and values of lifestyle.