Synergy Defined

Synergy is the energy or force created by the working together of various parts or processes.

Synergy in business is the benefit derived from combining two or more elements (or businesses) so that the performance of the combination is higher than that of the sum of the individual elements (or businesses).

 Case in Point  Joint Power of Four Horses

Two horses can pull about 9,000 pounds. How many pounds can four horses pull? The arithmetical response is 18,000. Sounds reasonable – but it's wrong! Four horses can actually pull over 30,000 pounds. It's synergy that makes the difference!

 Case in Point  Your Two Hands

What can you do with one hand?

What can you do with two hands? Twice as much? No! You can do much, much more! You can do absolutely new things, for example, play the violin. That's synergy!

Creativity

Creativity is not about inventing something totally new, it is about making new – synergistic! – connections. You don't have to be a special kind of person to be creative – everyone can do it. It's not about who you are, it's about what you do. You just need to start looking for multiple solutions rather than settling for just one, and give yourself permission to be playful and inquisitive, flexible and versatile... More

Systems Thinking

Your should master systems thinking if you wish to  discover winning business synergies. Systems thinking "focuses on the whole, not the parts, of a complex system. It concentrates on the interfaces and boundaries of components, on their connections and arrangement, on the potential for holistic systems to achieve results that are greater than the sum of the parts. Mastering systems thinking means overcoming the major obstacles to building the process-managed enterprise – for every business process is a whole system."²... More

Your Intention

Your intention is a synergistic combination of three elements: desire, belief, and acceptance. It determines your motivation and how successfully you attain your goals... More

Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements

Wood (Corporate Capabilities):

• Cross-functional synergies are discovered and exploited, diversity is leveraged... More

Synergistic Corporation

A corporation that builds on core competencies utilizes skills that combine to strengthen value chains and build greater competitive advantages. This leads to synergies among business units, whereby they become more productive together than independently. The collection of skills used in this situation is largely intangible, but corporations can also build synergies by sharing tangible resources.⁵... More

Harnessing the Power of Diversity

Diversity is a specialized term describing a workplace that includes people from various backgrounds and cultures, and/or diverse businesses. You can inspire systemic innovation and find a strategic competitive advantage in an organizational and cultural context by seeking to leverage, rather than diminish, opposite forces. People with different cultural, educational, scientific, and business backgrounds will bring different frames of reference to a problem and can spark an exciting and dynamic cross-pollination of ideas... More

Enterprise Strategy

Corporate strategy seeks to develop synergies by sharing and coordinating staff and other resources across business units, investing financial resources across business units, and using business units to complement other corporate business activities... More

Balanced Business System

Creating Competitive Advantage Through Capabilities

The opportunity for your company to sustain your competitive advantage is determined by your corporate capabilities of two kinds – distinctive capabilities and reproducible capabilities – and their unique combination you create to achieve synergy... More

Effective Leadership

Leadership is imperative for molding a group of people into a team, shaping them into a force that serves as a competitive business advantage. Leader know how to make people function in a collaborative fashion, and how to motivate them to excel their performance. Leaders also know how to balance  the individual team member's quest with the goal of producing synergy – an outcome that exceeds the sum of individual inputs. Leaders require that their team members forego the quest for personal best in concert with the team effort.⁴... More

Leadership-Management Synergy

To maximize your long-term success you should strive to be both a manager and a leader and to synergize their functions. Merely possessing management skills is no longer sufficient for success as an executive in today's business world. You need to understand the differences between managing and leading and know how to integrate the two roles to achieve organizational success... More

10 Commandments of Innovation

Synergize. Cross-pollinate ideas, leverage diversity, create synergies... More

Achieving Synergy through Coaching

Coaching brings more humanity into the workplace. "Effective coaching in the workplace delivers achievement, fulfillment and joy from which both the individual and organization benefit."¹ These three components – achievement, fulfillment, and joy – are synergistically interlinked and the absence of any one will impact and erode the others. "Learning without achievement quickly exhausts one's energy. Achievement without learning soon becomes boring. The absence of joy and fun erodes the human spirit."¹... More

Cross-functional Management (CFM)

Cross-functional management (CFM) manages business processes across the traditional boundaries of the functional areas. CFM relates to coordinating and synergizing the activities of different units for realizing the superordinate cross-functional goals and policy deployment. It is concerned with building a better system for achieving such cross-functional goals as innovation, quality, cost, and delivery... More

Real Time Business Development

Real time development brings about change and learning simultaneously - not separating the two. This approach is about "how to transform the development so that it means transforming the business whilst learning at the same time – continuously improving and learning and getting a business pay-off as an integral part of it. This means embedding development into how we do business and seeing it as part of doing business."¹⁴... More

Systemic Innovation

Innovation used to be a linear trajectory from new knowledge to new product. Now innovation is neither singular nor linear, but systemic. It arises from complex interactions between many individuals, organizations and their operating environment... More

Customer Intimacy – a Dynamic Synergy with Customers

Customer-intimate companies develop a new mindset – a new way of doing business – with new values, new vision, new strategies, new systems, and new structures. They are in the business of creating new value for their customer. They discover unsuspected problems, detect unrealized potential, and create a dynamic synergy with customers... More

Customer partnership is more than "putting customers first", or  finding mutually satisfactory solutions to shared problems, or  a dedication to excellence in every sale or service encounter. It also requires commitment to forging long-term relationships that create synergies of knowledge, security, and adaptability for both parties... More

Mutual Creativity in Business Partnerships

Mutual creativity is a shared mind-set. By learning to be creative together, you increase the chances of constructively sorting through your differences, which encourages you to go further. In an opportunity-maximizing strategic alliance, continued joint creativity leads to regular improvement, outperforming what any single change can do... More

 Case in Point  Amazon.com

New business model developed by Amazon.com creates value for customers by offering a synergistic combination of the following benefits:

No single aspect of Amazon.com's business model is sufficient to create a sustainable competitive advantage. It is the synergistic combination of all of these information services and logistical processes that creates value for customers and comprise Amazon.com's competitive advantage... More

 Case in Point  GE

"Integrated diversity" is a term used by Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, to define a learning culture. He described "integrated diversity" as the elimination of boundaries between businesses and the transferring of ideas from one place in the company to another. "Integrated diversity means the drawing together of our thirteen different businesses by sharing ideas, by finding multiple applications for technological advancements, and by moving people across businesses to provide fresh perspectives and to develop broad-based experience. Integrated diversity gives us a company that is considerably greater than the sum of its parts."²

References:

1. Effective Coaching, Myles Downey

2. Jack Welch, Letter to Share Owners in General Electric 1990 Annual Report

3. "Trusted Partners," Jordan D. Lewis

4. "Extreme Management," Mark Stevens

5. "Strategic Management", Alex Miller

6. "The Fifth Discipline – the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", Peter Senge