Believe it or not, once you cut through the clutter of main stream media and pass through financial meltdowns, Berlusconi’s dating habits, and shenanigans of reach and shameless, science and technology is advancing at a rapid pace. Which in itself is a miracle given the state of our education system and quality of our students!
These advances are going to create new industry leaders while committing laggards to the dust bin of irrelevance. Those who can spot emerging trends and catch the wave will succeed. The key to success is not a company’s size though, but the agility to innovate, affect and respond to change.
Take a look at Sears. The company practically invented selling to the masses in 1888, yet it failed to spot and capitalize on e-retailing as Amazon has. Compare Amazon to EBay, while Amazon stayed focused on its strategy, core competencies, and customers, EBay stagnates while having gone through numerous not so stellar acquisitions with its leader dreaming/ pursuing other opportunities.
Examples are plentiful: Motorola vs. Nokia, GM vs. Toyota, Sony vs. Samsung, Nortel vs. Cisco.
I should also point out that the successful company of today may become a total failure if leadership fails to stay in the game and keep their eyes on the ball.
Yahoo invented search and monetizing of search into advertising revenue. They recently took the step of outsourcing their search engine (brilliant!) to Microsoft, whose “Bing” appears to be a bust. This makes you think if there was ever a strategy behind such a venture other than total surrender and management ineptness. It certainly will not affect (in any meaningful way) Google and its portfolio of products, some of which are direct threat to Microsoft (Google docs vs. Microsoft Office).
Don’t let the size of Microsoft fool you. There are lots of parallels between Microsoft of today and GM of yesterday. What Microsoft’s management is failing to see is that they have or are ceding leadership in all segments of their industry. Their core Windows (fancy DOS with a colorful wrapping and a sexy name like Vista) is replaceable by Linux at server level, and with cloud computing will be replaced by Google Docs at the desktop; Xbox is playing catch up with Wii; Window’s user interface never caught up to Apple’s, and Zune lives in the dust of iPOD. This is clearly a case of failure in leadership. Doesn’t this look similar to GM’s Roger Smith era (see Michael Moore’s Roger and Me)
The challenge here is if your business runs on Microsoft applications, how do you prepare to take advantage of new technologies and capabilities offered by others, while protecting yourself from unwarranted and ill conceived upgrades?
How would you take advantage of Social Nets, texting, twittering? Or making sure that you and your organization don’t get side tracked by fads?
It is not just the technology on your desktop and back office that you should worry about. It is responding to trends such as Green energy. Do you concentrate on Bio fuels and totally ignore nanotechnologies in making new batteries. Would you concentrate on investing in nuclear technology and totally ignore emerging ones such as Nantennas?
Would you put your investment dollars (Euros or Renminbi) in developing organ transplant techniques or would you go after growing organs in the lab? Would you try to develop new medicine by mixing and matching old drugs (Cocktails) or would you pursue development of bacteria capable of attacking specific diseased cells? Would you promote a culture of invention and innovation and create jobs and build lives, or would you create complicated financial instruments in hope of making a killing before people realize that they have swapped their life time savings with worthless junk?
The key to survival, under intensity of competitive pressures and rapidly changing environment, is clear vision, deliberate strategic planning, innovation, focused tactical execution, and a network of dedicated partners who can collaborate, produce, and respond to change. And please don’t run to your favorite big X consulting firm asking them for a strategy. If you do, first ask them how much have they grown over the past decade, and what innovations have they patented or claim to have been directly responsible for? If their cookie cutter developed methodologies, executed by masses of recent graduates with no business experience, was any good, they should have used it themselves to great results!
This post was also published on 45 MagazinOnline, Oct/Nov 09 Issue: http://www.45magazineonline.com/flash_book/oct_mag/index.html
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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