In Looking to the Future, EXC Pursues a Model of Innovation and Shared Leadership

This blog post is a Q&A with Santiago Murtagh, who serves as President of several organizations operating under the EXC umbrella that are working to improve and advance Argentina’s competitiveness.

At the 2017 Global Innovation Summit in Malaysia this November, we’ll be discussing “The Sustainable Future of Production, Consumption, and Work.” Approaching this from the ‘micro’ level, how should businesses individually and as a group be connecting with government policy to create such a future? What kind of relationship is necessary between business and government for reliable progress in this area?

When thinking about the GIS title on “Sustainable Future of Production, Consumption, and Work” from a micro perspective, it is obvious that Work plays the most critical role as both the driver and enabler between Production and Consumption.

While technology disruption is exciting and easily grabs newspaper headlines, the most important disruption to hit humankind is that work is just about to be reinvented (yet again, last time being the Industrial Revolution). This new paradigm will take wealth creation into more abstract and intangible value, farther away from the physical word of natural resources, muscles or machinery. A bright, new future of creativity and imagination where talent rules and takes work to a whole new level of challenges, achievement and purpose. A harsh, uncertain present where unskilled, inflexible labor still needs to be steered into safe grounds. It is going to hurt, but we should prevail only because if we do not do it, others will.

In this context, business, their associations and government officials should simultaneously work on three fronts: a) Leverage the conditions and enablers of innovation, b) Provide the means and resources for transformation of those industries with chances to survive, and c) Build an honest and brave agenda to provide for social safety nets that brings cohesion for the society as a whole and meaning/purpose for those individuals whose job skillset is at risk.

On the same theme, what sorts of management models have proven successful in terms of ensuring all stakeholders — clients, beneficiaries, shareholders, employees, etc. — are invested in sustainability? How can business keep the interests of its stakeholders front and center while also promoting a shared goal of environmental protection and social responsibility?

As management is all about taking ideas and resources from plan to market, talent alignment is critical for success on today’s VUCA environment. And thus, alignment models are the natural answer for assuring all stakeholders are invested in sustainability.

There are two vectors on talent alignment which are actually working on totally different directions and building on a healthy tension: on the one side we see an empowered talent pool which is transforming the leadership paradigm from one of command and control to another of higher participation and decentralization. On the other side, we see a mature and informed society demanding greater accountability for business on sustainable and responsible wealth creation.

The former calls for decision making decentralization: talent models are quickly migrating from top-down to bottom-up ones. The latter calls for better control and governance practices: governance agendas are getting more serious on sustainable growth, so boards are not only vested into shareholders rights and equal treatment but also a sustainable growth agenda that includes the company’s stakeholders needs.

Both dilute the role of the CEO as the archetypical/visionary leader producing lasting and positive impact on their organizations. Most importantly, both require shared leadership, better accountability and a higher moral purpose, blurring the organization’s limits and mingling economic and financial performance goals with sustainability ones.

This concept will be explored in depth at the GFCC’s Global Innovation Summit in Malaysia this November as leaders come together to talk about the sustainable future of production, consumption, and work.

EXC offers its members an active exchange of ideas through professional and academic activities. Which of the activities — and the lessons learned from them — have applied equally, across the board, to the individuals and members of the consortium, and indeed are the ones that should interest all organizations involved in business and innovation? Where exists the most common ground on business development and competitiveness?

EXC offers different tools, mental models, and programs to foster organizational competitiveness. This lineup goes from quality competitions to benchmarking dashboards, innovation practices and holistic management models. However, while our content approach has been traditionally focused on action-learning programs (versus training or consulting), our bigger efforts are now directed towards building niche peer ecosystems through verticals (value chains), horizontals (best practices) and diagonals (regional clusters).

Following this new approach, one of the activities showing promising results on our members competitive skillset is our Peers Boards of Directors program (Peers BODs). This is a pilot experience that both EXC and the Production Ministry of Argentina are currently running on shared leadership and collaboration for a regional cluster of tool and equipment manufacturers.

The program steers groups of 6 to 10 SME owners on meetings which follow BOD protocols and practices and rotate on a monthly basis through the different members. A mentor facilitates the meeting dynamic, the host presents its company performance, gets input from her peers and then commits to a final plan which will be reviewed next time the company host a meeting.

The model started with the goal of disseminating technical knowledge and tools among different companies. With time, it helped develop other skills like strategy planning and financial management. But most importantly, it now also includes soft skills essential to any business like networking, information sharing, professional growth and shareholder governance for owners and their descendants.

The pilot is about to end and it is a total success. We had just grown into a third group. We are now evaluating to run a similar experience with science and technology firms, this time to provide them with project management tools to take ideas from inception to market.

This is not only a very powerful initiative with measurable impact at the micro level, but it is easily scalable to a national level through a viral model. We expect this program will definitively add to our macro transformation efforts: now that Argentina is opening its borders back again to the world, peer support can disseminate knowledge across business and help organizations compete on a global basis at a much faster and consistent rate. Not a minor challenge for an economy which grew for the last decade under the cozy wings of closed borders.

Santiago Murtagh is the President and General Manager of Culligan Argentina, a company that offers consumer water solutions, processes and effluents as part of Culligan International (The Water Experts ™). Under Santiago’s direction, the company was awarded the Balanced Scorecard “Hall of Fame” in 2010 and was awarded the National Quality Award of the Argentine Republic in 2012.

Santiago is a volunteer and president of three organizations operating under the EXC network. All of them (FUNDECE, the National Quality Award Foundation and IPACE) are working to improve Argentina’s competitiveness by promoting the implementation of management systems and tools, as well as the development of models for innovation and excellence in Argentine organizations. Among other milestones, the EXC space recently launched an observatory for the competitiveness of Argentine organizations, two national awards for innovation management and corporate governance, and a directory mentoring program for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Santiago Murtagh is a speaker at the GFCC’s 2017 Global Innovation Summit in Malaysia this November.