Conclusion

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Business leaders everywhere understand that it’s one thing to start up an organization and another thing entirely to scale it to achieve its true potential. With growth, complications as well as innovations multiply, sometimes in equal measure. This book has looked at what can be learned about building better organizations from publicly listed tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon, nondigital native companies such as Unilever and Patagonia, and private companies across the portfolios of firms like the Carlyle Group and Vista Equity Partners. What the leaders at those companies found is that the organization’s health often determines its success or failure. By applying a digital lens, this book revisits classic organizational topics that, individually and in combination, have demonstrated their value in elevating the health of an organization and its economic value.

Building better organizations is not a sideline project or initiative across top management’s agenda. Building better organizations is the agenda. The conditions for the health and effectiveness of the organization, the overall advances in digital technologies leveraging AI, and the capital and investor mindset supporting those endeavors all play fundamental roles in how to get from good to better. There is no blueprint, but the three building blocks explored in this book offer wisdom that’s at once simple and profound: Start with a better foundation. Grow into a better organization. And lead to be a better organization still.

So, where might you go from here? At its core, the book’s perspectives point to at least three possibilities.

First, set an ambitious direction and stick with it. For companies to achieve their full potential, they need to claim health as a critical organizational asset and use artificial intelligence to mine and leverage the breadth of insight available inside and outside businesses—all with the guidance of the kind of investor mindset found most often in VC-backed or PE-owned companies.

Second, be mindful of the level of energy and dedication required to build a better organization. Such an ambition forces leaders to design the conditions that help the organization run effectively and adjust as it scales. No leader can do that alone. But when the board, investors, and top management team work together to adopt a more holistic view, they will find they can balance a healthy risk tolerance with an investor mindset to create the conditions that enable organizations to achieve their full potential.

Third, recognize that mastering change requires practice. This book props up the importance of speed and acceleration in companies seeking to scale and grow. It also emphasizes the importance of an organization’s change fluency as a metaphor to guide the growth of a company’s agility practices, suggesting that just as with language fluency, learning to master change takes practice, and so does the ability to look beyond the near-term horizon.

We are on the edge of a paradigm shift in the way businesses operate, and the way organizations work must likewise shift if they hope to fuel growth into the future. Meanwhile, leaders across public and private markets who aren’t historically known for focusing on a business’s “soft” side—people and organizational matters—will need to try on perspectives they might not have tried before. They will need to take actions that build the organization’s health to fuel growth and lead in the digital era. By no means is this done in isolation. It requires close collaboration among CEOs, chief performance officers, and board members, including the investors who hold board seats, to map out and chart a course.

Ideally, this book will inspire more research about organizational health in digital, AI-first organizations. Above all, my fervent hope is that the study and discussion of this book will continue to help leaders identify their company’s most critical organizational levers, take stock of them, and make them more effective from start to finish as they scale to create more valuable companies in a new era of business that is already with us: the era of AI.