Customers Are Driving Change – Are You Keeping Up?

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Over 65% of UK bosses believe that businesses can’t keep up with the pace of change in today’s competitive markets and 57% agree that an inability to respond rapidly and effectively to change is one of the most significant risks their organisation faces today.

The new Fit To Change report highlights that factors such as ever increasing customer demand and new competitive threats are causing real problems for today’s businesses and that the pace of change is too quick for many UK organisations to keep pace with.

Customers are the biggest driver of change and are revealed as the biggest pressure point for businesses today . 83% of business leaders felt they were a significant factor and it was also the factor that they felt their own organisation was least able to respond to effectively!

This pace of change also means that business planning cycles are reducing – five years ago 43% of respondents believed they could plan with certainty two years ahead. Now, only 21% believe that is still possible today. 33% believe they can plan one year ahead, and 25% feel it is only possible to plan ahead six months with any degree of certainty.

The Fit To Change report highlighted that 97% of business leaders felt that to tackle change successfully, strong leadership is the key ingredient, along with the capacity to change and having the available resources to make it happen.

So, what does this all mean for you? I believe it’s even more crucial that business leaders consciously create time to work ‘ON’ their business strategically – that’s a fundamental element of effective leadership. It means ‘looking ahead’, even if that only is 6 or 12 months, identifying the opportunities and threats, and creating a clear picture of the future that they want – we call it ‘Getting That Vision Thing’! (It’s Charactersitic #1 of The 7 Characterstics Of 3D Businesses)

It’s vital of course that this vision is shared and understood throughout the business and that EVERYONE understands the priorities and what’s expected of them in making these things happen. It also means creating a clear understanding of what customers want, don’t want, and will want, and even more crucially agreeing the steps needed to deal with this.

We’re finding that more and more of our clients are asking us to work with them to help create that strategic focus – it’s about taking ‘time out’ as a team to establish and agree priorities, get some focus, and crucially, get ‘buy in’ to those priorities.

What are you doing to consciously create time to work ‘ON’ your business and ‘Get That Vision Thing’?

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Andy Hanselman
Hi there! I help businesses and their people create competitive advantage by 'Thinking in 3D'! That means being 'Dramatically and Demonstrably Different'! I research, speak about, write about and work with businesses to help them maximise their sales and marketing, their customer service and their customer relationships.

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