Every consulting and professional service firm wants to create more enterprise value. However, very few firms teach their people how to do it. Most workforce development programs focus on improving individual skills, competencies, and technical abilities. These specific task oriented programs do not impact the firm’s ability to create intellectual capital. They create individuals that perform tasks better and they marginalize the potential growth of their people and their firms.
The STAR Enterprise Value Academy takes a different approach. Every pillar of the Academy exists because it contributes directly to developing intellectual capital and enterprise value. The Academy takes consultants and professional service providers on a deliberate journey that starts with how business value is created and ends with how individuals become developers of intellectual capital.
The journey begins with Business and Enterprise Value Acumen because people cannot create value until they understand how value is created. Most employees understand their job responsibilities. Very few understand how their jobs impact the profits and valuation of the business. Employees that understand the strategic drivers of enterprise value until they know what to look for.
Consultants and professional service providers that understand how value is created must also develop the ability to create business value. The second pillar of the STAR Enterprise Value Academy focuses on Professional Performance Excellence. Enterprise value is created when consultants and professional service providers consistently and collectively diagnose innovative solutions to solve business problems. Communication across the organization is essential because an innovation in one function may be significantly amplified by an innovation in another function. This pillar bridges the gap between individual capability and organizational capability.
Consultants and professional service providers that understand business value and how to create it also need to understand how AI can significantly amplify the solution. The STAR Enterprise Value Academy approaches AI differently because there is no magic in using AI. AI-Augmented Productivity teaches participants how to use AI to rapidly accelerate the implementation and execution of the solutions. The additional productivity needs to be strategically channeled into the performance of other high value activities and the potential development of new sources of intellectual capital. AI effectively becomes the engine of the flywheel that is laser focused on developing intellectual capital.
Individual capability to generate intellectual capital is accelerated when the consulting or professional service firm increases its collective capability for generating intellectual capital. Operational and Process Improvement, shifts the participant's perspective from improving tasks to developing systems that transform firms. Systems generate more value with lower labor costs to create structural margin advantages and pricing power. Participants begin seeing themselves as systems developers instead of task performers. We have learned during the past year that productivity on its own does not correlate with more profit. Productivity that channels the individual’s time into higher value activities compounds individual and firm growth. Productivity that is used to create systems that can do significantly more of the work is transformational.
Once consultants and professional service providers develop systems thinking, they are better prepared to extend their influence throughout the organization. Strategic Leadership and Innovation expands their thinking from their impact as individuals to their impact on the organization as a whole. Leadership must align people, resources, and ideas around increasing enterprise value. Innovation becomes the rule rather than the exception.
The Academy also teaches them how to use AI to rapidly accelerate the implementation of systems based solutions and operational thinking. At this stage they they are shaping the current and future direction around building intellectual capital and enterprise value.
The final pillar represents the culmination of the journey, Intellectual Capital Development and Productization. Professionals transition from solving problems to creating assets reusable assets. Every engagement ends with the following question, "What reusable intellectual property have we created when we solved this problem and how can we apply it elsewhere?”. The answer may be a diagnostic, an operating system, an AI workflow, a playbook, a methodology, a decision framework, or another type of asset. Firms systematically capture, refine, and reuse knowledge. Intellectual capital becomes an asset that improves future performance and continually increases enterprise value.
This progression is intentional. Enterprise value is not created by isolated improvements. It is created by building a culture that continuously improves individual and organizational capabilities that create improvements. Business understanding enables better decisions and better decisions lead to better results. AI amplifies the creation and execution of productized service systems. Strategic leadership compounds the impact of the intellectual capital that is developed. The path and the implementation of the principles taught in the STAR Enterprise Value Academy create an organization whose knowledge, capability, and adaptability create significant competitive advantages in a rapidly changing AI driven business environment. An organization that fully embraces and implements the Academy needs to make incremental changes rather than wholesale changes as AI develops.
The purpose of the STAR Enterprise Value Academy is to develop professionals who build innovative systems to create more valuable organizations. The highest-performing firms of the future will not simply be a product of using AI. They will turn knowledge into highly valuable reusable assets. The Academy was started to create a sequential path for consultants and professional service providers to move from task focused to intellectual capital focused.
Email me at bkerrigan@excelerating.com for two diagnostics focused on the strengths and weaknesses of each professional and the strengths and weaknesses of the organization with respect to the development of intellectual capital.