The Concept
Co-founder of Success Formula, Ron McLuckie, has always been fascinated by what makes companies successful. He says...
Success Formula taps into potential
There exists in every company a huge and mostly untapped wealth of experience, knowledge, insight and motivation that, for many reasons, lies dormant. My major motivation was to tap into this resource in an efficient and user friendly way and use it to transform organisations - read about our clients.
We designed the Success Formula process to tap into the "collective genius" of all key stakeholders (owners, staff, management, customers, suppliers) to generate a unique formula for that organisations success that delivers on their business vision - see how this is constructed.
One size fits all doesn't work
I have seen and experienced first hand the limitations of many organisation development approaches; the “silver bullet” models. They are offered as a possible panacea to every company’s woes. Typically, a group of (business school) researchers identify a relatively small sample of highly successful companies, studies them very robustly and then publish the results in the form of the new “holy grail’ for companies to implement and so achieve their goals.
The other approach is relatively complex models of organisation effectiveness postulated by “gurus” with little or no empirical backing. While many of these models make an excellent contribution to our general understanding of organisations, they frequently do not meet the business performance expectations at specific company level. I sincerely believe that the highly prescriptive models of organisation change will never fully deliver desired outcomes.
Every company is different in many ways and while they share common challenges, each company needs its own unique improvement strategy designed for its specific situation - see our own Success Formula example.
In many cases these “success example” companies have failed shortly after the studies. I honoured conventional wisdom that “the magic is in the people”, in developing Success Formula. All my practical experience, academic study and common sense affirms this.
Engaging people in change
We also know that any significant change requires the active participation, commitment and staff support to succeed. Rather than “selling” organisation change to staff members we designed the Success Formula process to actively engage people in the change process and drive its implementation.
Pictures means more
It’s no secret that many company vision, mission and values statements have very little emotional or other appeal in how they are presented. Frequently they appeared as wordy documents in fancy frames, proudly displayed in various places of honour.
In terms of sparking passion, creating engagement and generating excitement they achieved very little. I have experienced this on numerous occasions. To overcome this challenge Success Formula represents all important concepts in highly visual form through appealing pictograms. We believe in the “picture tells a thousand words” idea.
Manage what you measure
The final challenge that I wanted to overcome with Success Formula is to address the issue of robust and ongoing measurement of organisation performance against the Success Formula components. The process incorporates regular scoring to assess progress and plan further improvement.
Robust Academic Theory or Experience-based
My undergraduate, post graduate & MBA studies have offered some useful insights. But practical experience being employed by a number of interesting organisations added a lot more understanding and insight.
Working in the consulting world internationally and with a broad range of organisations, processes and organisation development products proved invaluable. Working with many different people including business executives, academics, researchers, shop floor staff, professional colleagues and a host of others is where I gained the insight that formed a lot of the Success Formula thinking. In summary;”
Success Formula is a powerful, simple and user friendly continuous improvement and change management process that improves business performance!