I think I must be a geek because I like creating order (that doesn’t automatically mean that I’m a very orderly person, rather the opposite).

One of my first priorities in my new position was to orientate myself in the “order” of things, or rather to have a good view on what the process from customer generation to customer acquisition is (my interpretation of the lifeblood of every company).

So my questions, very formal, covered following three elements:

• what is the profile of a customer most valuable to our company?
• what are the USPs of our company for these customers?
• what is the process of converting potential customers into actual customers?

The answer was that there is no simple answer to the question, except that over time I would learn to understand what was possible or not.

It kind of follows the paradigm that the famous Harvard Business Review article called “The Knowledge-Creating Company” introduces, where experts possess a lot of tacit knowledge, which they use to do their job (Incidentally, the HBR-article is authored by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, who are the original protagonists of the Scrum approach).

In other words, over time, by accumulating experience, I would be able to develop a type of instinct regarding stuff like what a good customer is, what optimal solution is for him, and how the internal process works of customer conversion.

But the article takes it further (and is also my inspiration) in that from tacit or implicit you move to explicit knowledge, meaning that processes are documented and standardised. A kind of spiral forms, indicated in the picture below. This also reminds of Gerber’s franchise methodology in the E-Myth Revisited.

The question is what internal and environmental conditions have to exist for this spiral to function properly, and whether it can be applied universally to all company processes. I do not think so and would ague that in environments that are constantly changing, like global finance or when starting a company, making things too explicit undermines the speed-advantage that the tacit approach brings.

A little academic perhaps (you know me… ), but what do you think? What company processes typically need to be made explicit, and which are not served by this?

Vincent

Related posts:

1. The Dynamics of Blogging and the Dynamics of Doing Business
2. Company-strategy: answering the 'process-coding' riddle
3. Random thoughts on: Men's vs. Women's fashion statements, 'Virtual' Offices, and (corporate) Centres of Knowledge
4. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
5. What are the ingredients to launching a company?