Stop synergies - Start performing
I like the quote of Harvey Specter because it simplifies a complex phenomenon of our economic reality:
The only time success comes before work is in the dictionary!
Following that analogy, Steven R. Covey worked on his 7 habits stacked chart where private success lays the ground for public success. Of course, it starts with being proactive which means to stop complaining and start to work your ass off. Also, you have to follow clear priorities with the end in mind - otherwise, you are just playing stupid. At the point where you've mastered your private/personal success, you can think about synergizing with others and multiply over team-work.
What we still see a lot in big organizations is making synergies the one and only religion to follow. It's a purely technocratic approach, crunching numbers to succeed in short-term cycles and boil down the responsibility and leadership to simple accounting charts. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage the numbers through accounting synergies than enable your teams to be able to achieve private & personal success. What we neglect is the performance explosion possible when you show your people that their personal performance leads to multi-layer and deeply satisfying success.
When you train your teams to follow the accounting religion you take away the possibility to show them the beauty of making great products and work together in highly productive teams. Money is "just" an enabler for economic success and it is the most important duty to transform it wisely into team performance and sustainable products & services.
Observe big organizations and large enterprises - in most cases, their shareholder value story comes from financial rope jumping and outsmarting tax/finance regulations. They try to change and transform without radically changing their minds about what comes first and how to synergize on the grounds of solid personal success. You can't open up the minds of your teams in regulating down their action radius and creativity. You will not motivate them to think out of the box, truly innovate and have the guts to follow it through.
Financial synergy works like a downward adjustment of motivation and ambition. It dilutes the requirement for personal success and satisfying thus meaningful performance. We shouldn't be surprised when organizations seem to be immune to change and transformation - they just perform on the rules they where taught and that the value is crated above them via equalized synergies top-down.
It's not a romantic fantasy but accounting should be an enabling art, a source of transparency and fuel to grow. Let's put it that way:
Not the counts achieve but the achievement counts!
Even if agile organizations are not successful by default - the mindset of enabling team success and minimize rules, regulations, and formal communication has a better chance to succeed and create real sustainable value. Agile zooms into individual performance and enables private success which establishes a personal relationship to products and services.
Probably it's a good idea to slice and dice big organizations into vertical product-oriented performance teams. Detect the value where it is created. Improve it, transform it, and motivate the people involved directly to seek for great customer experience and sustainable products. You will see real growth and fast development - and hell yeah you'll make a lot of money too.