Page 235 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

214 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

` metAskIll two: renew yourselF

If constant learning helps you improve, grow, and move forward,
renewal refreshes your organization. Best Buy, the company that
began the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) experiment
that is spreading to organizations exponentially, is also an example of
renewal.
Bala Chakravarthy and Peter Lorange outline a four-decade
process of evolutionary transformation that has allowed Best Buy to
move from a small audio components store in Minnesota to a chain
of superstores, then to a low-price consumer electronics warehouse,
then to a hybrid low-cost/high-end electronic merchandiser, then
to modular stores with knowledgeable in-store consultants who can
handle complicated transactions, and then to an organization with a
customer-centric and segmented approach, a reengineered customer
experience, and more employee responsibility for decision making.
Talk about renewal! Best Buy doesn’t attempt revolutionary change;
instead, it aims for continuous renewal, looking for new opportunities
while building new capabilities. Best Buy experiments, explores
opportunities, stops experiments that don’t work, revises the vision—
re-visioning continuously. 11
Organizations that keep up with the Phoneses are self-renewing.
They reinvent themselves. They renew their resources. They refresh
their workforce. They not only learn, they innovate.
Innovation is back. Tools are evolving in faster cycles, replenishing
old technology with weekly and even daily automated updates. This
time frame is much faster than in 1987, when LearnKey got started,
and measurably faster than last year. This is a sign of fast, dynamic,
on-the-fly technology. Innovation such as this will drive the mobile
workforce too. Collaboration technology used on the mobile laptop
along with the mobile devices will be synched and able to interchange
data on the fly, and automatically. The real private network is the one
between our own devices that will connect and share with each other,
saving time and effort to keep up with information. How about the