The Ten Business Value Aspects: The Machine Metaphor For Your Whole Company

(Part 3 of a 4-part series on the tenets of business and management.)

A business really is a machine. You put resources in one end, turn the handle, and the customer puts money into the machine and holds their hands out under the chute to collect the output. Simple, right?

Except most businesses aren't running a well-tuned machine. They're running one with a few components polished to a shine and a few others completely missing… and then acting confused when the output is inconsistent, or slow, or just plain broken.

Why "Aspect" and Not "Function" or "Activity"

I use a specific list to describe the persistent, ever-present dimensions of any healthy business. I call them Value Aspects, deliberately, instead of Value Functions or Value Activities. Function and Activity imply strict segmentation – a box you check off. Aspect implies something more fluid and symbiotic – a lens you look through, from multiple angles, to examine the nature, quality, and character of what's actually happening.

These ten Value Aspects closely correlate with Porter's Value Chain, and that's no coincidence. They're both derived from the common activities present in any real business. But there's a critical difference. Porter's Value Chain is a tool for defining and refining strategy. The Value Aspects are the perspectives you use to execute that strategy and to measure your organization's overall maturity. You build your strategy using the Value Chain. When it's time to execute, you break it down into Value Aspects.

The Ten Business Value Aspects

Here's the full list:

1. Communications & Collaboration
2. Finance & Accounting
3. Human Resources
4. Marketing
5. Organization & Infrastructure
6. Procurement & Logistics
7. Production Operations
8. Research & Development
9. Sales
10. Service Delivery

Every one of these exists in your organization right now, whether you've intentionally cultivated it or not. Even if you've never once thought about Research & Development, that Value Aspect still exists in your business, and its neglect still has consequences. If the ingredients in your product have quietly changed, or your service delivery methods have gone stale while competitors innovated, that's R&D neglect showing up as a value problem, whether you labeled it that way or not.

The Machine Doesn't Care About Your Priorities

Here's where the machine metaphor gets uncomfortable. You cannot excel at marketing and sales while neglecting logistics and service delivery. If you do, customers will scream for their money back. And when they do, the wheels fall off the wagon. You cannot build a great product while running poor HR processes, because you'll never find or retain the talent needed to deliver that product consistently.

Each of these ten aspects has a symbiotic relationship with the others. They can support each other, or they can weaken and hinder each other. Neglect one and it's not a compartmentalized problem; it's a leak that eventually shows up somewhere else in the machine, usually somewhere you weren't watching.

An organization that focuses on only a few of these aspects, to the exclusion of the rest, does not have a sustainable model. Full stop.

The One Aspect Everybody Ignores

Nine of these ten aspects get some attention in most organizations, even if imperfectly. The tenth – Communications & Collaboration – is almost universally overlooked, and it's costing businesses more than they realize.

Communications today is essentially free. Anyone, anywhere, can reach anyone else instantly. We do business with suppliers, partners, and clients across the globe as if they were down the hall, 24 hours a day. And yet most organizations are genuinely bad at communications and collaboration. Not because the tools are missing, but because getting connected isn't the same as connecting with the right resources and actually using them well.

This Value Aspect isn't about your phone system or your project management software. It's about the methods and culture surrounding how your team communicates and collaborates. It's the most esoteric, least tangible of the ten. But it's also the glue holding all the other nine together. Cultivate this aspect in any appreciable way, and you'll see a return on investment disproportionate to the effort. For a lot of organizations, that improvement alone is enough to bring the whole machine back into balance.

The Coach's Play Call

Pull out the list. Rate your organization honestly on each of the ten. Not on effort, on actual maturity. You'll likely find two or three that are running strong, a few that are adequate, and at least one you've been quietly ignoring. That neglected one isn't a minor gap. It's the missing component in your machine, and it's throttling everything downstream of it.

Next up in this series: How to actually build your business roadmap and strategy, starting from the top of the pyramid, not the bottom.

_{Image by ESBProfessional | Envato}