What do Apple, Coca Cola and IKEA have in common?

Only a few of the leading organizations around the world achieved what is called world class excellence. Examples include Apple, Amazon.com, IKEA or Coca Cola. By definition world class excellence is the highest business performance at a global level that stood the test of time, and just those who perform at the top 5% box from a global perspective are regarded as the world class companies. Why don’t we have a look what it takes to attain this so called world class excellence?

Operational Excellence

All world class organizations demonstrate their excellence through exceptionally high standard in operational performances. Operations function in an organization is responsible for fulfilling customer requests through procurement, production and delivery of products and services. It is therefore central to the organization because it produces goods and services that define its reason for existence. The level of performance depends on many factors including quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.

Strategic Fit

In any world class organizations, or those on the journey to achieve it, there must be the right strategies at play.

Right strategies are those intermediate the firm with the industrial environment; fit the organization’s capabilities to the stakeholder’s objectives; and matches the internal resources to the market opportunities. Such “fitness” of strategic positioning of a firm is the indispensible ingredient of any successful stories.

Capability to Adapt

Organizations that meet the challenges with the right responses are regarded as success. But when faced with new challenges, all too often, the old successful pattern of response no longer work. The continuing success calls for new and innovative responses that can effectively meet the new challenges — that equate adaptation. Capability to adapt should be part of an organization’s ‘DNA’ that needs to be designed and hard-wired into the business structure and processes

Unique Voice

The Unique Voice means the unique organizational voice. It represents something unique that the organization created and practices in achieving its business success. Unique Voice is as a combined representation of any unique business policy, process and operation that fit particularly well to the organization’s specific circumstance and delivers the winning performance as the result. Research shows that all world class organizations became so by having something unique, something that they do differently from their competitors and as a result they bring about market success. The world is littered with evidences of such uniqueness such as in IKEA.

IKEA is a world leading furnishing company. Its unique voice is a bundle of signature practices that creates the value by enabling customer’s own value creating activities. It offers a brand new division of labor. If the customer agrees to take on certain key tasks traditionally done by manufacturers and retailers – assembly of products and their delivery to customer’s home, then IKEA promise to deliver well-designed products at substantially lower price.