This week, the world’s leaders gather in Davos for the World Economic Forum, an important annual event where politicians, business leaders, activists, and thought leaders come together to discuss the most important issues affecting the world.
I was invited to Davos in 2017 to participate in a discussion about the link between business strategy and impact and I found the overall experience to be very positive. Whilst the WEF event has its critics, I found the participants to be well-informed, well-meaning and inspiring.
On Monday, in Davos, PwC used this event to release the findings of a new survey, with the key headline being that 40% of global leaders think their businesses will be ‘unviable in 10 years’ because of the lack of available talent and the impact of technology.
That’s a very large number of CEOs with a frighteningly low level of belief in their ability to reinvent their business over the next 10 years. Why is that?
Well, it could be that they rightly believe that the challenges facing incumbent businesses are simply too difficult to overcome. I don’t accept that.
It is more likely that most CEOs don’t believe that they can reinvent their organisations … because most CEOs are simply not good at reinvention. In fact, in the majority of cases, they are not employed to reinvent. They are employed to manage an existing organisation within the narrow parameters of historical success.
The CEOs of large corporates, with a very few exceptions, have never been entrepreneurs or founders. They have come from solid professional backgrounds, have worked their way up steadily, have been a safe pair of hands and have proven themselves to be competent business leaders. All good. But, of course, that is not to say that they can not, and should not, try to re-invent their businesses. As one very famous founder and CEO said … they just need to ‘think differently’.
At Stratega we help organisations to do just that … to think differently. We help Business Leaders to understand the rationale for reinvention and we help them to redefine their businesses. We then carefully redesign the business and finally we help them to realise the new vision and create value for a broad range of stakeholders. We use a simple framework for Reinvention that we call our R3 Re!nvention Framework.
It’s not rocket science, but it’s a tried and tested approach to helping organisations think differently about the future and ensure that, over a period of 5-10 years, they never become ‘unviable’ and that they are constantly proactive so that they respond quickly to market challenges.
There really is no excuse to say that your business will be ‘unviable in 10 years’.
If you’d like to learn more about how we work with organisations please contact us at Stratega.
