All species, including humans, are inherently adaptive, yet the organisations humans inhabit are by their nature resistant to change.
The management challenge of the future is to figure out how to build an organisation that evolves sufficiently quickly to be ahead of the changes occurring in the environment around them so as to be in a position to exploit and leverage those changes rather than just reacting to them.
Democratising knowledge, isn’t this a lovely term! I have heard it used on a number of occasions recently, and it came up again in an extraordinary TED presentation by Stephen Wolfram .
In just two words it nails the complex changes happening in numerous ways in our lives. Knowledge used to be power, now it is freely available, it is simply a tool, and the ones who use it best will win, rather than in the past, where the holder of the knowledge had a huge advantage.
Amongst all the other things that have changed, is the potential to turn simple supply chains that pump product into a channel driven only by capacity, into demand chains that respond backwards to demand signals from the customer.
This opportunity for change driven by a combination of the communication tools on the net, and the ability to assemble and analyse the drivers of demand in your particular market offers huge potential for innovation, efficiency, and differentiation based on the capabilities of those in the chain.
These are sometimes used interchangeably, and they should not be, as whilst they go together, they are very different.
Visions may change, values should not, and increasingly, as we are in a world of commodity offerings, and I suspect the long term is going to belong to the few that have a set of core values that drive behavior.
Google to date has managed to keep its essentially commodity offering of search sufficiently differentiated and interesting that it dominates the scene, and is the latest in a very small group of brand names that have become verbs. However, in China, the fastest growing search market, and inevitably the biggest at some point, Google are modest sized players, so their decision to not censor search requests as per the demand of the government and risk being precluded from the market tells us a great deal about the values of the company.
In the long term, this decision, consistent with the Google value of making information freely available to all, will benefit the business, although the short to medium term is likely to be painful financially, and disastrous for their market position in China.
Great marketing strategy is hard to develop, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
The difficulty lies in the need to hold several often opposing ideas in the brain at the same time, very hard for most.
First, where to compete. This may be geography, channel, product category, market segment, and so on.
Second, how to compete. This may be the media used, branding strategy, articulation of the value and differentiation of the product, which of a choice of initiatives will be followed, which measures will be used, and so on.
Following one logic is easy enough, but the necessity to reconcile and make the trade-offs and choices necessary to hold two, many of which are mutually exclusive, is very hard.
Trader Joes in the US is not a huge chain, but they are one of the ones to watch to see what the others will be doing in the future.
Joes has a rich history of being different, and their customers love it.
The latest move is to announce that they will be rapidly changing seafood supplies to sustainable sources, of seafood, and if history repeats, this will be the first of many to follow that line. It is probable that Woolworths or Coles in Austalia will follow closely, there may be an opportunity emerging for aquaculture suppliers to gain shelf sapce, and for the retailers to lift the poor performance of their seafood counters.
How often have you seen decisions taken that reflect a short term profit opportunity, rather than addressing a longer term need?
In politics, the word “spinable” can usually be substituted for profitable.
All organizations face the challenge of balancing short term expediency against the longer term, and usually tougher to sell, need.
A measure of the leadership of an organization is the extent to which they focus on the need, rather than succumbing to the siren song of expediency, and the extent to which there is a philosophical framework in place that guides these deliberations, and drives consistency of decision making over time.