Extensive research from TomorrowToday’s Strategic Insights Unit is revealing what makes companies successful in the new world of work. Our latest study illustrates seven big problems, seven big questions and seven big answers to enable leaders to build agile organisations. The answers to these questions is revealing what needs to be done to build businesses that are fit for the future and fit for people.
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THE BIG ISSUE
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THE BIG QUESTION:
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THE BIG ANSWER
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One |
The world is increasingly more complex, noisy, crowded and ferociously competitive | How do we capture the attention, passion and commitment of the people most important to us? | Define your organisation’s quest – the difference your organisation makes to society and the higher calling that sets people’s souls ablaze. |
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Two |
The world is now too complex to “go it alone” | How can leaders build collaboration into the DNA of business? | Partnership, alliances or joint ventures don’t go far enough. Build collaborative communities, platforms around which entire communities of customers, suppliers and even competitors can thrive, develop and become mutually dependant thereby ensuring survival and longevity. |
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Three |
For too long business has been based on boosting ROI and profits. This single-minded approach brought capitalism to the brink of disaster. Today society, governments, employees, customers and even shareholders expect more from leaders. | Which RULES are no longer valuable and what RESULTS are most important to our stakeholders? | Declare war on dumb rules, faceless bureaucratic policies that represent steeplechases to strategic agility. Every rule should have an owner, someone willing to champion the reasons. If there is no owner get rid of its legacy.Create Shared Value involves reconceiving products, redesigning value chains and building local cluster so that the economic pie grows bigger for everyone. What’s good for society becomes good for business.
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Four |
Operational efficiency has been the name of the game (and still is) but the stakes have been raised. As we move from the knowledge economy into connection economy, collective intelligence and innovation become more critical | How can we build intelligence and relentless innovation into our business? | Move beyond business intelligence toward building smart systems and collectively intelligent systems that expedite innovation and support learning through experimentation |
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Five |
People remain an untapped competitive advantage | What can leaders do to get more engagement from people inside and outside our organisations? | Identify and nurture “we are great’ tribes of passionate people in your organisation by delivering on the benefits of friendship – three timeless rules 1) be supportive 2) share dreams and aspirations 3) encourage other friendships |
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Six |
Trust in business is at an all time low and is now a major competitive advantage. The Internet and social media have made business more transparent than ever before | How do we build TRUST into a competitive advantage and create a truly empowered and TRANSPARENT organisation? | Remove the corporate veneer, focus on cultivating human values in your organisation like empathy, generosity, kindness, fairness, love and family |
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Seven |
Market and customer needs change so quickly now that strategies are implemented too late to be effective. Speed to market is now a competitive advantage | How do we implement successful strategies quicker than competitors do? | Focus on three principles of speed – clarity of purpose, unity of strategy and the agility to accept that in a fast moving complex world plans will and should change |
These are the ingredients of the new business scripts, a model to build organisations that are agile, adaptable, relevant and fit for the future.