Is your company building a future

All Stakeholders - customers, employees, shareholders & even society as a whole want to work for a company which is futuristic in his approach. Excellence or world class’s definition will keep changing & evolving with time. Fortune companies list & various researches conducted have proven equally time and again that there are no “permanently” excellent companies or industry or a sector. If we look at success factors behind successful companies you can find a few common thread among them.

When I talk to my clients and they often talk about cut throat competition, I tell them competition has a place in your strategy & is important but not the only deciding factor always. Lack of a proper strategy may result into this situation.While consulting them on growth and making competition irrelevant, I always advice those to look at uncontested market spaces a term now very popular in a board-room. This approach helps everyone as it address growth not only for your organization but for overall market instead of fighting around often declining demand. Benchmarking is good exercise but fails as an approach here as you are still trying to be something which already exists.

While you read, you may have started thinking many examples where organizations have crafted their own place. I have personally applied frameworks & used tools which have been very helpful. One of the enablers for a successful strategy is that it is understood by everyone in the organization. Not only they understand strategy, they also know what role they have to play in there. While we are working towards maximizing opportunity we should be as well careful to minimize risk. It’s a calculated risk where you have to built trust & get commitment from whole organization.      

The challenge which every practitioner faces while applying this is how to size this market as you don’t have any past data .When a business create a new market ,it need not be just a geographical expansion of business. It can be as well as a result of new products, new services or new customer segments. It’s like building new roads to go to a new place where no roads exist today.

I develop these insights while I was observing the companies I worked for in last two decades .These companies became number one or two in the world in their own industry segments or markets. They were known as inventor and were market leaders. As they become from innovators to mass producers value converted into volume and margins declined. As your product becomes a commodity, you have to lower the price point hoping to increase the market share & revenues, but you may not sustain them even if you want to forget about profitability I have also seen companies sometimes look at merger and acquisitions route to show growth in their accounting books & to create a buzz in stock market and sometimes with customers but  I have also seen them writing off the value which they once claimed. The question remains whom are you trying to fool and for how long? Great organizations who build future know that business have a life beyond their CEO’s tenure with them or his entire work life or their own life. So go ahead and build a future where you can set your own rules and competition does not matter.