Corporate Strategy
The world’s dynamics have all changed from how people gather information to how they communicate it, with longer reach and greater impact than ever before. One quick video captured on a smartphone can be viewed by literally millions of people around the world in a matter of hours. Also, emerging technologies, globalization, innovation, and the convergence of the business and communications world is continuously changing the rules of the road. Areas in a business that were once considered impenetrable are now being raided and even seized by the most unlikely competitors – often becoming instant leaders.
Given all of these factors it is still possible to find a way and a place of true leadership in this newly crowded marketplace that produces substantial value for both the organization’s shareholders and employees. In order to accomplish this, organizations – for nonprofit and for profit alike – require a corporate strategy that can sustain their strongest position in its key markets, that will assist them in their ability to lead.
The new rules of the new economy can be harsh:
- Competitive advantages once bullet proof can disappear overnight.
- What is considered an advantage today can easily become a requirement tomorrow.
- Organizations that operate without a unique differentiated distinction should expect a lack of profits.
The corporate strategy for the new economy
As the marketplace has changed, many organizations have not kept pace with their corporate strategies. In good business times an annual review of the strategic plan can suffice, but in these difficult times a program of continuous strategy and improvement is required. Sometimes management intuitions and gut level decision making is sufficient, but this is the exception rather than the rule for most senior executives. For the vast majority of businesses, what works best is what is well planned with a thorough understanding of the marketplace, its perceptions, attitudinal insights, and buying motivations.
Given the new technologies available today it is possible to produce ten times as much market information and business intelligence in a tenth the time that was impossible just five years ago. Rapid prototyping, when joined with perception gap analysis, can yield enormous insights across a business’ enterprise. This new type of strategy formulation brings great flexibility and control of specific strategic initiatives and their implementation. The key to this implementation is in providing key executive leaders with the understanding of their organizational strengths and weaknesses as well as their competitors so they can develop programs that drive with their strongest strategic and tactical value. This is made possible by leveraging both lagging and leading indicators in each of the organization’s functional areas. This cross-functional process drives high value across the organization and begins to create ‘values forward marketing’ that builds a general management-learning competency at the top and throughout the organization.
The question you have to ask yourself today is, am I prepared for the future? Hopefully the answer is yes because the business world is becoming increasingly harsher and less forgiving to even the best-known companies.