When I realized I had an idea that aligned with my CIO's key strategies to save cost, I pulled a few senior network engineers together for weekly strategy meetings. After several months, our efforts to accelerate elimination of our old, legacy network and migrate to new network technology progressed remarkably well. Since our mission was tied to CIO vision to reduce operating expense, I took the opportunity at the beginning of each meeting to remind the team of this important fact. Studies by sociologist over the past 50 years have confirmed over and over again that innovative, creative thinking is sparked by autonomy, mastery, and higher purpose, as outlined in the best selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. We had plenty of autonomy and continuous mastery while CIO vision served as our higher purpose.
Quantifying cost savings, the scope of work, the resource requirements, and the schedule were our initial focus. Naturally, the team’s enthusiasm grew as we began to see more and more how our work would improve the organization. The initial scope was regional cost savings, but as we produced more promising results, senior managers agreed to expand the scope to the entire enterprise and requested an action plan.
Overtime, our efforts blossomed into a multi-year, multi-million dollar cost savings initiative that is helping achieve one of my organization’s key strategies. As I describe in my article, I followed 5 simple steps (click here). Have you tried to bring together an experienced team to explore a new organizational strategy or improvement? Were you successful? If so, how? If not, what obstacles did you encounter?
