Moments of Truth!

Perhaps there was a time when companies could adopt a single strategy, prove its worth, and follow it for many years. But now, even the best of businesses must constantly re-invent themselves.

Let’s look a little more fully at the options facing business today. Things are fragile to say the least. Talk of green shoots - or is it parched tufts - bulls in the market and taxes to pitchfork funds into the national debt.

What is the solution? Three things I think. The first is productivity. And by productivity I don’t mean shedding labour. I mean keeping it and finding productive ways to achieve more with additional efficiency and pass on cost reductions to customers. I just wonder if the average business let this one go in the good old days when market share was the name of the game.

The second is to ‘fight’; to battle to maintain your share of the wallet. More inventiveness and tirelessness to achieve even higher levels of customer service is the way to hold and potentially capture more customers. I’ll never forget Andrew Cook saying that nothing in the world could take the place of persistence. And he should know; he took his business from obscurity to market leadership in a recession!

And the third is strategic innovation. No strategy will remain unique forever. A company that succeeded by creating a unique position for itself 10 years ago must do that again – and again- if it is to survive into the future. And quite frankly there is no time like the present to do this!

So what of a company in good times? What strategies should it then pursue?The same! Increased throughput will come from more productivity, more service and more innovation.

See you soon

P.S. For more information why not click here for a copy of “How to Invent New Business - the practises of strategic innovators and how they create and exploit new markets”.