ARTICLES ARCHIVE

Licensed by Cross-Silo
Adapt or Die

How to deal with a polycrisis?

The term “polycrisis” refers to a situation where multiple crises or challenges co-occur, creating a complex and interconnected web of problems. The World Economic Forum

Situational Growth
Positive Change

The Great ReEvalution and Theory Y

Many wrote articles on the Great Resignation, a term coined by Anthony Klotz, a professor of management at University College London’s School of Management, in

CROSS SILO
Conditional Mastery

The Paradox of High-Performing Systems

You may be familiar with Kurt Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze theory on organization change. Harrison Owen, the author of Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a

cross-silo-shutterstock_243638314_2500
Positive Change

Whole System Positive Change

We built a Whole System Model of Business™ to work toward high-performing systems. More recently, we focused on organizational development (OD) and change management (OCM)

thevaluetrain
ROUNDMAP™

Introduction to the ValueTrain™ theory

Having studied Porter’s Value Chain theory (1985) and following our concept of the ValueHub™ (2012), we started to wonder whether the analogy of a chain and

ROUNDMAP™

Driving Collaboration Across The Silos

Harvard lecturer and global trend watcher Vikram Mansharamani wrote in his most recent book Think for Yourself: “The world, to put it bluntly, has changed, but our philosophy

The White House
Positive Change

ROUNDMAP’s System of Change

First, let’s have a quick look at how the ancient Greeks thought about change: The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC) was famous for

ROUNDMAP_shutterstock_505018624
Change Circles

Make Change happen with Change Circles™

Very few business transformation initiatives succeed. According to academic research, a staggering 70% of business transformations fail. That same number also applies to digital transformation

ROUNDMAP_Conditional_Leadership_Copyright_Protected_2021
ROUNDMAP™

Conditional Leadership™ in a VUCA World

Business leaders are most effective when they know how to respond with efficacy to stable conditions. However, our era is defined by high volatility, uncertainty,

ROUNDMAP™

When Competitive Advantages No Longer Last

Core competencies and lasting competitive advantages provided many incumbents with a unique position to extend and defend market share. But times are changing. Competitors and

ROUNDMAP™

The Pressure Cooker Response

As we could have learned from the late Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation will, sooner rather than later, disrupt existing products, markets, and supply chains, following

ROUNDMAP™

Keeping an Eye on Vision

While every component is equally important, there is one component that we would like to highlight: having a corporate vision. The most effective innovation leaders

Share of value
ROUNDMAP™

A Verdict on The Purpose of Business

Following a short conversation on Linkedin, we realized that the definition of the purpose of business is still very much open for debate. Let’s review

resignation
Research

Avoiding The Great Resignation

Before the pandemic, Gallup reported in September 2019 that 69% of employees were ‘actively disengaged,’ indicating they were unhappy and unproductive at work and liable

ROUNDMAP_Mastering_Situational_Growth_S1191380731
Conditional Mastery

Mastering Conditional Growth™

In the post How to Achieve Sustained Growth, we made a case that growth is essential for any company. Without planning for growth, operations will

ROUNDMAP_RoundTable_2000_shutterstock_1120985537
Change Circles

Customer Lifecycle Map™

When ROUNDMAP’s creator, Edwin Korver, set out to rethink the customer development process, given the sudden rise of social media and digitalization from 2008 onwards,

ROUNDMAP_Quadriga
Conditional Mastery

The Four Archetypes of the Business Cycle

Following the post ‘Conditional Mastery™ – Getting a Grip on the Business Cycle,’ in which I explained the four stages in the business cycle, known

cross-silo-wall-shutterstock_1203360403
ROUNDMAP™

ROUNDMAP™ Framework 101

Today, executives and managers struggle with the problem of stagnating or even declining growth. Often due to forces like global competition, digital disruption, erratic customer

pixabay-startup-593341_1920
Making a Case

Consult: How would you define success?

A few days ago we were asked to consult a social enterprise. We wanted to share this story as it is exemplary for most start-ups.

business cult
ROUNDMAP™

When Business Culture Became a Cult

During my research, I’ve often asked myself the same question: Why do people participate in the creation and delivery of products and services that are

Change
Adapt or Die

Formula for (Digital) Change

During our research, we stumbled upon an interesting concept: a formula for change. It was promoted by Dick Beckhard (Organizational Transitions, 1977) and Reuben Harris

chart-1905225_1920
CROSS-SILO

ROUNDMAP™ and Data Silos

To make informed decisions in complex matters may require access to multiple sources of stored information (data), throughout the business enterprise. However, security, privacy, and

ROUNDMAP™

ROUNDMAP™ – How We’ve Closed The Loop

When we introduced our first symbol on May 11th, 2019, we had just finished mapping the realm of Customer Dynamics. However, as time went by, our

Digital
ROUNDMAP™

ROUNDMAP™ and Digitalization

How does ROUNDMAP™ relate to Digitalization? “The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organizational change management process that meets two key

Customer Carousel

ROUNDMAP™ and Spiral Dynamics

How does ROUNDMAP™ relate to Spiral Dynamics? “Competency is more valued than seniority; knowledge is more useful than status.” ― Don Edward Beck, Spiral Dynamics:

CROSS-SILO

ROUNDMAP™ and Stakeholder Theory

How does ROUNDMAP™ relate to the Stakeholder Theory? “The task of executives is to create as much value as possible for stakeholders without resorting to

growth hacking
Customer Carousel

ROUNDMAP™ and Growth Hacking

How does ROUNDMAP™ relate to Growth Hacking? “Be undeniably good. No marketing effort or social media buzzword can be a substitute for that.” –Anthony Volodkin,

ROUNDMAP™

ROUNDMAP™ versus Design Thinking

How does ROUNDMAP relate to Design Thinking? “We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.” ―

cog-wheels-2125169_1920
The Venture Wheel

The Growth-Progress Paradox

Following the previous post on How to achieve sustained growth?, in which we suggested that progress leads to sustaining growth, the question now is: What

ROUNDMAP-valuehub
The Venture Wheel

How to achieve sustained growth?

Progress and growth are not just akin, they are essential for any business to thrive. The capacity to meet known challenges builds robustness, while growing

two-wolves
ROUNDMAP™

Remain Humble

We can’t expect customers to share their feedback if we treat them with arrogance. And yet, this is the default mode of operation of most

Wheel of Taranis
ROUNDMAP™

ROUNDMAP™ and Symbolism

While creating the Customer Roundtable Blueprint, a continuous mapping system of the Customer Dynamics to help forge strong customer relationships to achieve sustained growth, we

doors-1767562_1920
CROSS-SILO

The Breadth of Perspective

Ever since Frederick Taylor suggested applying Adam Smith’s principle of the Division of Labor within the production and industrial engineering industry, to increase worker productivity,

Relevance
Customer Carousel

The Evolution of Purpose – Remain Relevant

If you had the chance to look at the ROUNDMAP Customer/360 Canvas, you might have noticed two words: Awareness (blue section) and Significance (red section).

ROUNDMAP-Pink-image
ROUNDMAP™

Leadership relies on Vision

You can’t lead people without having a vision of the future. Where else would you lead them toward? You’ve got to communicate what it is

ROUNDMAP-Hope
CROSS-SILO

10 Ways to Deal with Crises

As a consequence of the worldwide lockdowns, following the life-threatening effects of the corona virus (COVID-19), many revenue streams discontinued almost overnight. Leaders need to

ROUNDMAP-Cover-image-passion
Customer Carousel

The Trinity of Design Thinking

The inconvenient truth is that an estimated 93% of Customer Experience (CX) initiatives fail, while in 2016, according to Gartner, 89% of companies expected to

ROUNDMAP-Decoupling
Adapt or Die

Decoupling of the Value Chain

Professor Thales Teixeira from Harvard Business School took 8 years to write his book ‘Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption’. His

ROUNDMAP-Cover-Carousel-Blueprint
Customer Carousel

Customer Carousel™ Blueprint

Customer Carousel™ is one of the outcomes of a 4-year discovery process by Edwin Korver and it turned out to be an amazing panorama, not

Adapt or Die

Ride the Waves of Change

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth.

ROUNDMAP-Growth-Achievement
ROUNDMAP™

Where to find future growth?

The big question on every executive’s mind is: Where to find future growth? Whether the question is an urgent one or driven by a regular

ROUNDMAP-Cover-money
Customer Carousel

Right on the Money

Since the early 1960s, Silicon Valley is known for its many tech-startups. The birth of the Internet in 1995 meant that information, experiences, opinions, and

ROUNDMAP-Mind-Gap
CROSS-SILO

Mind the Growth Gaps

You may have heard the words “Mind the gap” as an audible or visual warning phrase when you entered or left a train, to take

ROUNDMAP-Cover-careless
Research

Youngest Generations Succumb To Pressure

Employee disengagement is one of the reasons why companies fail to achieve their growth aspirations. However, underneath it, lies a much greater problem: “Half of

GENERAL

ROUNDMAP™ Lexicon

During the development of the body of knowledge of the ROUNDMAP™ 4-dimensional framework, we found that existing words or concepts ─ often originating from a

ROUNDMAP-Cover-digital-business
BUSINESS MODEL MATRIX

Digital Business Transformation

Digital Transformation has become a prevalent topic on the boardroom agenda, however, according to BT most CEOs aren’t that confident that their company will be

ROUNDMAP-Cover-Change
Adapt or Die

Change or Transformation?

Digital transformation appears to be on most corporate agendas, however, most transformations are actually change-initiatives, i.e., adaptations to market conditions. And that’s a bad thing

ROUNDMAP-Yesterday
GENERAL

Yesterday When I Was Young

A few days ago I watched an interview on television with a well-known Dutch poet, performer, and author, Jules Deelder ─ in celebration of his

Making a Case

Master of Business Transformation

Following our previous post in which we introduced the Business Model Compass™ and the Cycle of Disruption™, we like to propose an antifragile counterpart of

ROUNDMAP-Almere
Adapt or Die

Businesses don’t transform by themselves

We know digital transformation is most critical to business survival. However, research by Prophet and VINT suggests that executives are becoming increasingly aware of two

ROUNDMAP-Lotus
ROUNDMAP™

The Wheel of Dharma

Despite not knowing about the Wheel of Dharma and the Eightfold Path, the resemblance with the structure of ROUNDMAP™ is remarkable to say the least.

ROUNDMAP-Uncertainty
Adapt or Die

How to deal with uncertainty?

Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO of five businesses, author of five books in which she explores business and effective leadership, and a part-time lecturer

ROUNDMAP-Conflict
Adapt or Die

Heffernan: Dare to Disagree

Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO of five businesses, author of five books in which she explores business and effective leadership, and a part-time lecturer

ROUNDMAP-Cover-Carousel
Customer Carousel

Advancing The Customer Carousel

I truly love the series Mad Men, however, there is one scene in particular, which was the grand finale of season one, that has kept

ROUNDMAP-Keystone
Customer Carousel

Who’s the boss?

In order to explain something complex, it may help to use an analogy. Therefore, let me tell you about ancient pillars, keystones, and bosses with

ROUNDMAP-Return-Refer
Customer Carousel

What makes customers return or refer?

ROUNDMAP™ Integrated Customer Lifecycle differs from the traditional sales cycle – which focuses on achieving customer satisfaction – because we believe customers won’t refer or

ROUNDMAP-News-IBM
Adapt or Die

Adapt or Die: IBM’s Rebirth

It can be really harsh to be a casualty of disruption. It is not for the fainthearted. Automakers, the news media, entertainment industry businesses, banks,

ROUNDMAP-News-Picking-order
Adapt or Die

Bypassing the Pecking Order

Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO of five businesses, author of five books in which she explores business and effective leadership, and a part-time lecturer

ROUNDMAP-News-AQ
Adapt or Die

Adapt or Die: Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

Whether a startup has the potential to become a success very much depends on its founder(s). To assess the leadership of a startup most investors

ROUNDMAP-News-Compassion
Making a Case

The Case for Customer Compassion

In a previous post, we made the case for empathy. Today, we would like to make the case for customer compassion. When we made the

ROUNDMAP-News-Chatham
Change Circles

ROUNDMAP™ Roundtable Rules

We talked about setting up Customer Roundtables, as a second operating system or shadow structure, to allow the free flow of information between customer-facing employees.

ROUNDMAP-News-Change-Gear
ROUNDMAP™

The Responsive Company

In 2015, during one of my executive assignments, I was asked to write a book on the potential of big data. However, as I researched

ROUNDMAP-News-Achieving-Excellence
Exclusive Content

Growth Activation™

The goal of the ROUNDMAP framework isn’t merely to improve your firm’s commercial performance, rather provide a lens through which to perceive the aspects related

ROUNDMAP-News-Round-Table-Nato
GENERAL

King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table

The idea for a customer round table began when I started to imagine people sitting around the ROUNDMAP™ to discuss all customer-related issues openly, decoupled

ROUNDMAP-News-Collaborate
CROSS-SILO

Harnessing Horizontal Collaboration

We’re all too familiar with the typical bureaucracy consisting of a hierarchy of authority, while employees are grouped by the functions they perform for the

emirates-on-top
Exclusive Content

Driving Customer Excellence™

A tagline serves to clarify a thought, product, brand, or proposition. A tagline for ROUNDMAP™ is Driving Customer Excellence™. However, the problem with words is

ROUNDMAP-News-T-shape
GENERAL

Innovation calls for T-Shaped People

In January 2005, Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, wrote an insightful piece for FastCompany introducing Design Thinking into the field of strategy, while also

ROUNDMAP-News-Customer-Touching
Customer Carousel

Customer-touching Activities

One of the learnings from creating the ROUNDMAP™ is that, although most firms consider marketing, sales and service as their main customer-facing operations, these activities

ROUNDMAP-News-Price-Volume
GENERAL

Price/Volume Matrix™

Since price strategy is one of the pillars of any business strategy, I took some time to create the Price/Volume Matrix™. I believe the graph

ROUNDMAP-News-Meritocracy-Fallacy
CROSS-SILO

The Meritocracy Fallacy

In an alarming article in The Atlantic by Daniel Markovits, professor at Yale Law School and author of The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel makes a strong

ROUNDMAP_CVP_Break-even
GENERAL

Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis

If you’ve taken our online Coordinator Course, you are already familiar with the universal concept of a ValueHub™ and its Orchestration. However, to capture enough

BUSINESS MODEL MATRIX

ROUNDMAP™ Strategic Playbook

We’ve spent a lot of time to explain the disciplines involved with Customer Dynamics (cross-functional and cross-structure) resulting in the ROUNDMAP™ Framework. Because we believe

ROUNDMAP-Repetition
Customer Carousel

The Drawback of Specialization

At the individual level, specialization usually comes in the form of career or labor specialization. Each member of an organization or economy, for example, has

ROUNDMAP-beyond-competitive-advantage
ROUNDMAP™

Beyond Competitive Advantage

We’ve discussed the term ‘competitive advantage’ more than once, as described in the book ‘Competitive Advantage’ by Michael Porter. However, competitive advantage is merely one

ROUNDMAP-Stacked
BUSINESS MODEL MATRIX

ROUNDMAP™ Full Stack

To understand what elements and aspects the ROUNDMAP™ mapping system actually contains, we’ve created what we call the ROUNDMAP™ Stack: While the Integrated Customer Lifecycle™,

ROUNDMAP-Thiel-Polymaths
GENERAL

No Polymaths Allowed

During an interview with Peter Thiel for “The Portal” by Eric Weinstein, the discussion on technology and culture made a turn towards how universities are

ROUNDMAP-Experience-Design
Customer Carousel

Experience Matrix™

Experience Design is widely recognized to be critical to the customer development process. Not just in our digital age, but even long before bits-and-bytes driven

CROSS-SILO

Horizontal Strategy

Much of what we do at CROSS-SILO Management Consultants is focused on getting departments to collaborate more effectively to improve customer performance. To that effect,

ROUNDMAP-EMB-coexisting
BUSINESS MODEL MATRIX

Coexisting Business Models

A question I get asked a lot is: Can two Elementary Business Models™ coexist within one company? Car Manufacturers versus Car Sharing Platforms Let’s take

ROUNDMAP-Empathy
Making a Case

The Case for Empathy

An article recently published in Harvard Business Review emphasizes the importance of cherishing a culture in which empathy is strongly embedded. As you may know,

ROUNDMAP-valuehub
ROUNDMAP™

The ValueHub™ Theory (2)

You may first want to read part one of the ValueHub™ Theory. If you already have, let’s have a look at how the ValueHub™ theory

ROUNDMAP-valuehub
ROUNDMAP™

The ValueHub™ Theory (1)

In hindsight, the idea behind the ROUNDMAP™ originated from a meeting in 2012, to which I was invited, to help determine the future of a

ROUNDMAP-Chaining
GENERAL

Chain of Success™

After 25 years in leadership roles with organizations such as Southwest Airlines, JetBlue Airways, DoubleTree Hotels, and Juniper Networks, Ann Rhoades is a leading expert