Repeatability Is Your Strategic Driver Of Intelligent Growth In Uncertain Times

Although you may recognize the green and yellow tractors, combine harvesters, and other wide range of machinery and tools for agriculture, construction, and forestry, you may not know that Rutland, Vermont-born John Deere was a blacksmith, moved to Illinois and invented the first commercially successful steel plow in 1837. Deere’s plow was significant because it was suitable for the tough prairie soil of the Midwest and revolutionized farming in that region. It was made from steel, which was more durable and efficient than the wooden or iron plows used by farmers.

From adapting to changing agricultural practices and technologies to fierce market competition, economic and trade fluctuations, and labor relations, one of the key attributes that have grown John Deere into a globally dominant player in their space through continued periods of uncertainties is the strategic investments they’ve made to hypothesize, test, and fine-tune their repeatability. From expanding their product line and entering the tractor business through an acquisition in the early 1900s to a new generation of power in the 1960s, precision agriculture in the 1990s, to AI and autonomous vehicles in the 2010s, repeatability has been their enabler of competitive success against both current peers as well as new, digital-first market entrants.

In 2022, Deere & Company introduced a SaaS business model, allowing farmers purchasing Deere equipment. to access data-driven insights via a sold-separately subscription service. The company acquired startup SparkAI, a humans-in-the-loop AI technology that integrates human cognition into robotic processes to guide the tractors through obstacle-laden farm fields precisely. Deere & Company’s goal to become the digital leader in AgTech will drive new and recurring revenues via new digital and subscription economy business models.

IDC predicts the number of tech providers in the Global 500 will double by 2027, incorporating businesses that originated outside the tech industry. And there lie opportunities for digital consultancies like West Monroe, which serves companies across many industries, including consumer and industrial products, energy and utilities, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, private equity, retail, and software and high tech. In a conversation with Casey Foss, Chief Commercial Officer, we discussed how many industries can no longer afford to stay in their traditional lanes.

“We partner with clients to ensure their resources are extracting insights and working on value-add roles – while we focus on digitizing and automating the dirty, dull, or dangerous parts of the job,” said Foss, who has been with the company for 15 years.

West Monroe focuses on how they can help streamline processes and experiences through digital products designed to save employees time and improve the customer experience. In our conversation and subsequent Intelligent Growth podcast interview, she discussed how West Monroe is driving a more efficient and customer-centric loan origination process for banks—improving the employee experience through better handoffs while reducing efforts in document gathering and enhancing the customer experience due to a 30 percent faster application review.

Furthermore, we discussed how custom products delivered to the pharmacy industry would improve the vaccine process and drive $15 million in savings by reducing wait time from 25 to 4 minutes. Of particular interest were our discussions around utility companies, not naturally known for digital innovation, deploying systems to help automate distributed energy management. For one investor-owned utility, their digital platform reduced interconnection application approval time by 50% and increased the number of applications processed by 300%. This resulted in $4 million in electronic payment revenue and over 3,000 labor hours saved for the utility.

The common theme between these case studies? Repeatability as a strategic driver of intelligent growth. Enterprise repeatability to fuel growth enhances a company’s ability to replicate successful organizational practices and achieve consistent and competitive results.

Enterprise repeatability requires constant exploration. Successful product launches, sales processes, service delivery, and more benefit from iteration, consistently learning and improving existing approaches. Iteration often leads to real innovation, where you’re doing things differently. Innovate often enough, and you’re likely to run into opportunities to disrupt, where the new approach makes the old obsolete.

Here are several fundamental drivers for enterprise repeatability:

1. Strategic Clarity: Provide all employees with a clear roadmap to make faster, better, decentralized decisions. Allow all employees an opportunity to think differently and drive value early and often.
2. Standardization: Create common procedures and practices that can be used throughout the organization by various functions and capabilities enabled by a cohesive tech stack. Standards make training an evolving roster of talent, ensuring exceptional quality, and repeating quantifiable successes easier.
3. Systematization: Implement suitable systems architecture to support standardized processes. Invest in tech platforms that enable employees to focus on high-value tasks, including optimized communication, workflow management, data analysis, and visualization.
4. Culture of Exploring and Learning: Intentionally value exploring and learning while celebrating learning moments to uncover growth opportunities and innovate. Allow your team to test new hypotheses and candidly examine successful initiatives to understand what worked and what didn’t and immediately apply those lessons in other areas of the organization.
5. Knowledge Sharing: Share information about what works (and what doesn’t) freely up, down, and across the organization. Ensure key functions are empowered by robust reporting and executive dashboard infrastructure, regular pre- and post-mortem meetings, relevant training and development programs, and a speak-up culture.
6. Talent Management: Attract, develop, and retain exceptional talent – those who will challenge your status quo vs. constantly defend outdated mindsets, skillsets, and roadmaps.
7. Visionary Leadership: Proactively nurture and challenge high-performing, high-potential visionary leaders through a growth mindset in becoming the best version of themselves, a culture of experimentation unafraid of taking prudent risks, innovative go-to-market strategies, and enterprise repeatability practices.
8. Key Metrics, Above Market Compensation, and Feedforward Mechanism: Measure the right metrics, create a performance-based compensation for outputs, outcomes, and impact for critical roles, and encourage a feedforward mechanism that can level up the team’s skills, knowledge, and behaviors. Focus on measuring a few things really well, and combine lagging indicators, such as KPIs, with leading drivers, such as sentiment or predictive analytics, for the entirety of the desired outcomes. Above-market compensation, when tied directly to performance, execution, and results, aligns expectations regarding intelligent growth. Feedback is the rearview mirror. Look for opportunities to provide and get feedforward that we can apply immediately to the next effort.

Enterprise repeatability is all about consistently achieving success. In our continued environment of uncertainty, repeatability is your strategic driver for net new growth opportunities. You don’t hear much about Deere & Company selling steel plows. Instead, they’re leading the market conversation in digital farm management systems.