Gowtham Chilakapati is a Director at Humana. He is a seasoned leader in portfolio management.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face mounting pressures to innovate, adapt and deliver value—all while keeping an eye on costs and compliance. Strategic portfolio management serves as a critical compass.
As I reflect on my experiences, a compelling analogy emerges: organizations as tribes. In tribal societies, members unite under shared goals, rituals and strategies to thrive in dynamic environments. Similarly, strategic portfolio management requires fostering unity, adaptability and a shared sense of purpose within organizations.
These qualities manifest as cohesive team dynamics, the ability to pivot in response to evolving business environments and a unified commitment to organizational objectives. By integrating lessons from anthropology, particularly the Kula ring exchange system, we can uncover timeless strategies to enhance portfolio success.
Lessons From The Kula Ring: A Framework For Portfolio Success
The Kula ring, practiced by the Trobriand Islanders, was a ceremonial exchange system where communities traded shell necklaces and armbands in a circular network across islands. Its structure fostered trust through mutual obligations and clearly defined roles, ensuring the exchanges benefited all participants.
For instance, items were not traded for immediate practical value but as symbols of relationships, with their exchange governed by strict protocols that reinforced social bonds and long-term collaboration. More than mere trade, it fostered trust, strengthened alliances and ensured mutual prosperity. This anthropological example offers profound insights for modern organizations:
1. Shared Vision: Like the symbolic value of the Kula items, an organization’s vision acts as a guiding emblem. For example, consider a tech company aiming to revolutionize customer experiences through AI-driven personalization. Each portfolio initiative, such as developing machine learning models or integrating customer data platforms, aligns with this vision, ensuring that every step contributes to the overarching goal of delivering unparalleled customer satisfaction. Every portfolio initiative should align with this shared vision, ensuring collective progress.
2. Adaptive Strategies: The Kula ring thrived on adaptability, with participants navigating unpredictable seas. Similarly, organizations must pivot strategies based on market shifts, regulatory landscapes and technological advancements.
3. Collaboration And Role Clarity: In the Kula ring, every participant had a defined role—from the navigators to the traders. Portfolio success hinges on cross-functional collaboration, with clear accountability and communication.
Additionally, the symbolic exchanges in the Kula ring ensured not only material benefit but also mutual respect and long-term alliances. These lessons resonate in managing modern portfolios, where fostering trust and delivering value are paramount.
Setting Effective OKRs
Objectives and key results (OKRs) are the compasses that guide the tribe (organization) toward its goals. Here’s a roadmap to ensure OKRs drive measurable success:
1. Crafting Objectives That Inspire Action
In the Kula ring, the purpose of exchanges was clear: strengthen relationships and secure mutual benefits. Similarly, organizational objectives must be ambitious yet achievable, inspiring teams to rally around them.
2. Defining Key Results As Measurable Milestones
Markers of progress in the Kula ring included successful exchanges and sustained alliances, which parallel measurable milestones in a modern portfolio. These might include achieving specific revenue targets, launching new product features on schedule or reaching predefined user engagement metrics.
Just as each successful exchange reinforced trust and collaboration among the Islanders, hitting these milestones builds organizational confidence and ensures alignment with strategic objectives. For organizations, key results must be:
• Specific: Avoid ambiguity.
• Measurable: Quantify success.
• Time-Bound: Anchor results within a timeframe.
3. Foster Unity Around OKRs
Like the Trobriand Islanders gathering for Kula exchanges, teams must connect over shared goals using modern collaboration tools and rituals. For instance, digital platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams can act as the metaphorical “marketplace” for exchanging ideas and progress.
Scheduled check-ins or sprint reviews mirror the ceremonial aspects of the Kula, reinforcing trust and alignment among team members as they work toward shared objectives. Leverage platforms for collaboration, communicate the “why” and celebrate milestones to maintain momentum.
Prioritizing Initiatives: Choosing The Right Path
In the Kula ring, traders prioritized valuable items and mapped their routes carefully, ensuring their exchanges aligned with broader tribal goals. A modern example is Salesforce’s strategy of prioritizing initiatives that enhance customer relationships.
By investing in innovations like real-time data integration with platforms like Genesys, Salesforce not only achieves operational efficiency but also strengthens its customer-centric vision. Similarly, organizations face the challenge of prioritizing initiatives.
Here’s how:
1. Aligning Initiatives
Evaluate each project’s contribution to strategic goals. For instance, in health insurance, prioritizing real-time data integration between Salesforce and Genesys ensures alignment with customer-centric objectives.
2. Measuring ROI
Projects should deliver tangible benefits, whether cost savings, revenue growth or enhanced customer satisfaction. Modernizing to platforms like Snowflake often yields efficiency and scalability.
3. Considering Risks And Dependencies
Like navigating treacherous seas in the Kula ring, assess potential risks and resource constraints. This ensures smoother execution.
4. Adopting Agile Rituals
Agile practices, akin to adaptive tribal rituals, allow for real-time recalibrations. Regular sprints ensure the portfolio evolves with shifting priorities.
Driving Results In Complex Organizations
Success in portfolio management hinges on execution, a principle mirrored in the Kula ring’s structured exchanges that emphasized not just the completion of transactions but the reinforcement of trust and alignment within the tribe. Similarly, modern portfolio management requires deliberate actions that ensure initiatives are carried out with precision, fostering collaboration, trust and measurable outcomes at every step.
Leading The Tribe Into The Future
Strategic portfolio management, much like the Kula ring practiced by the Trobriand Islanders, blends art and science by uniting a shared vision with adaptive strategies and collaboration, ensuring mutual benefit and long-term success. By setting clear OKRs, prioritizing initiatives with precision and fostering collaboration, organizations can thrive in the digital age.
As leaders, our challenge is to guide the modern tribe—our organizations—toward shared goals, innovation and resilience. The wisdom of the Kula ring reminds us that unity, adaptability and purpose remain timeless tools for success.
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