INTRODUCTION TO PIVOT

LEARNING IS ALWAYS A WORTHY ENDEAVOR, but it does no good unless you can figure out how to implement and make useful what you have learned. In part III of this book, we show you a practical process to implement network orchestration in your own organization.

Does that sound too ambitious? You’re right. You’re not going to transform your organization’s business model this month, or even this year. Instead, you can plant a seed—select a network and create a platform where the network can both contribute and receive value, as can your organization. You will begin with a small network investment in a single portion of your business—one that has the potential to grow into a new core business. As you nurture, adapt, and grow this seed along the way, you will practice the asset allocation, business model, mental model, and leadership principles that differentiate network orchestrators from the pack, leading to happier customers, employees, and investors.

We’ve spent the past ten chapters discussing the great shifts that set network orchestrators apart and lead to their success. The great shifts, however, take place on the macro level, and it’s not easy to implement macro-level change. For that reason, part III focuses on the micro level—five steps (Pinpoint, Inventory, Visualize, Operate, and Track, or PIVOT) to guide you through incremental changes and investments to set the stage for network growth. For each step we give straightforward guidance, bite-sized recommendations that you can implement as experiments and then iterate in your own organization, along with real-world examples of how other companies are adapting. We help you create a network that fits the capabilities of your organization.

Here are the five steps of PIVOT:

1. Pinpoint: Identify your current business model.
2. Inventory: Take stock of all your assets.
3. Visualize: Create your new network business model.
4. Operate: Enact your network business model.
5. Track: Measure what matters for a network business.

Each chapter opens by looking at how business model innovation is transforming an industry and then transitions into specific guidance for accomplishing the goals of each step in your own organization. We also include case studies that benchmark what network orchestration looks like in other organizations, both in start-ups and in established firms.

At the end of each chapter, we reflect on what each step looked like as we went through the PIVOT process with Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a treasured client. Enterprise was one of the first organizations to use our fully developed PIVOT framework, and we are grateful for its courage and boldness and for allowing us to use its story of value creation through network orchestration as a case study in this book.

Jim Rouse and his wife, Patty Rouse, founded the not-for-profit in 1982 on a simple principle: to solve the problems facing low-income communities—from persistent poverty to poor health and educational outcomes—we must start by providing safe, healthy, and affordable homes. The Rouses saw housing as the critical “first rung on the ladder of opportunity.”¹

Over the next thirty-plus years, Enterprise has invested more than $18 billion and helped to build 340,000 affordable homes. But Enterprise is far more than a financial institution or public policy advocate. It is in the business of helping create opportunity for people by building networks—with home at the center.

Digital technologies have created new opportunities to connect people and create opportunity for low- and moderate-income families to raise their standard of living. Digital networks are fast becoming an integral part of life for even the poorest in the world, as you saw in the refugee story presented earlier in this book.

Terri Ludwig, Enterprise CEO, sees the opportunity to expand the organization’s impact on its target group by leveraging digital technologies. Although housing is the first rung of need, Ludwig says that the firm can go much further, connecting individuals to education, jobs, health, and other foundational building blocks of opportunity.

Enterprise has begun exploring how it could use big data analytics and technology-enabled social and mobile networks to serve its mission. Its leaders are asking new, what if questions that are changing both how they think and what they do:

• What if we knew more about the lives of residents in Enterprise-supported homes?
• What if we knew more about their unique needs, from the health needs of a senior to the educational gaps of a child?
• What if we knew more about the emerging trends in their cities and neighborhoods?

Enterprise’s leadership team, with the authors’ help, has been tackling a significant transformation as it seeks to apply PIVOT to its business model, from financial services and local program development and policy, to a new, digitally enabled direction. Ludwig’s overarching objective for Enterprise is to fulfill Jim Rouse’s original vision: to help solve the toughest, most intractable problems facing low-income communities and to be a “light to show the way.”

We return to the Enterprise story throughout this PIVOT section to show you how this transformation is taking place in one organization. We hope it will provide guidance and inspiration.

Note that additional resources and support can also be found at openmatters.com.