2010 – The Euro is in free-fall, and the global uncertainty continues. After battling through 2009, with your business bruised, but intact, you consider yourself amongst the fortunate ones, having survived the “perfect storm”. But now, the uncertainty continues, resulting in more nervous investors, more caution and more doubts about how we position our businesses to meet the challenges of 2011.

3rd Quarter – The time for Visionary Leadership!

This point in the global economic flux is not a time for timidity. In this article, we argue that visionary planning and aggressive action will distinguish those who thrive, from those who falter.

Q3 2010 – strategic planning time… and time to get really creative! Consider these suggestions – they may be painful, and they may not be for you…. BUT…..

Consider a Blue Ocean Approach.

How cautious were you in 2010? Did you attempt significant revenue growth, or were you content to ’survive’? Did you consider any new major acquisitions? or developing new products and services? Did no opportunities in emerging markets present themselves?

Dunkirk this is not – Survival is not Success. BLUE OCEAN Strategy – there is no better time than now:
* locate un-served market segments;
* locate innovative technologies;
* break the value-cost trade off in your supply chain;
* Create uncontested market space, by challenging market boundaries.

Blue Ocean – An Illustration

TATA built the NANO, focusing on an un-served market segment in India of potential car owners who can only afford $2500 – building modest unit level profits, but enormous market presence. TATA applied Blue Ocean thinking to its supply line.; building partnerships with a limited number of suppliers and putting everyone in the same room to work through problems and innovate- thereby delivering a unique value proposition, which makes the NANO viable.

Re-Align

Did the recession require you to combine business units, re-align teams, and divest layers of management? Or did you simply tighten your belt?

In the climate of uncertainty, how do you ensure that you remain competitive? How do you structure your organization so it is most effective and manage resources, so the company is most profitable? Winning companies will take this planning opportunity to realign their structures by consolidating, merging, acquiring and investing now in capabilities that will best differentiate them from their competitors.

Managing your portfolio for success requires that you make decisions that:
1. Capitalize on their core and unique competencies;
2. Seek complimentary acquisitions which build on their core capabilities, and
3. Drive down costs by divesting businesses which increase complexity through use of unique competencies

What’s has been clear from our experiences in 2010, as in 2009, is that there is the potential for discontinuous change in the structure of most industries. Your, success hinges on your ability to adapt immediately and continually to structural changes, and seize strategic opportunities. These opportunities are likely to be present in front of you now.

Senior Leaders must ask themselves:
* Are these lines of business vital to the future of the company?
* Will this business generate sustainable growth opportunities for the company?
* Does this business offer potential for returns greater than investors could achieve in other areas of their equity portfolio?

Divestment of an line of business in a portfolio often sends shivers up the spine of a CEO, in fear that the loss of a revenue stream may be irrecoverable. However, the more likely outcome of divesting a non-performing asset or line of business, will be the freeing up of capital and time to growth more promising lines of business.

Tweak your Organization Culture

Fear permeated all workforces in 2009. Fear crushes motivation and energy. Creativity and innovation are inextricably linked to energy, and motivation. The creative spirit is essential to drive your organization out of the current economic and emotional malaise.

Organizational behavior therapist will claim that by applying “engagement”, motivational stimuli” and engendering “discretionary effort” etc. we will be able to extract more out of our demotivated and diffident workforces.

The truth is that in these times, trust will be hard to build. Leaders will need to work hard to make up for the goodwill that will have been lost, and this will be even more demanding when seeking to re-align and divest (human or other) assets

First – understand your culture….is it cohesive, is it participative? Does you workforce feel aligned with your values and your vision? (Affiliation). Or is it overtly performance focused? Failure to deliver bites hard in times of downturn. Performance – focused cultures feel this pain the most.

It is vital before you proceed on a major organizational transformation initiatives, that you have clarity on the norms and values which prevail in your organization today. IN conducting an organization culture survey, you will be able to plan for organizational improvement initiatives, which make the process of restructure and change much smoother, and with greater chance of success.

Build Leadership Competence

Your talented high performers will probably be very skeptical of simplistic approaches to “cultural engineering”. Indeed, it is our contention that high performers are often turned off by bureaucratic process, by internal politics, by smoothing over the ‘crack’s with statements of “shared cultural values”, and – above all -, they will be disenchanted by inadequate leadership.

Ineffective leadership is immensely costly – we only have to look around the global business landscape today to see the remnants of companies which were once dominant. Much of the blame for their demise lies squarely in complacent, short-termist and poorly educated and trained leadership.

We often consider the role of the leader to provide certainty in what are uncertain times. Certainty is, as has been seen, an illusion. The truly great leaders will instill the ability to ‘adapt’ and cope with the constantly changing environment which our economies face in the coming years.

We recommend investing in developing your leaders as a matter of high priority. The leadership of the future must be able to adapt to rapid change, to think strategically, and to manage continuous change in the workplace.

Go Web 2 – embrace the future

Are you aware of the potential of Web 2 technologies today. Do you know how much your legacy systems are costing you, your ERP, your CRM system – what is the true total cost of ownership of these systems? Have you spent the typical 5 times the original price of the software cost in operating and maintaining the systems (the normal TCO)? Do you know there are alternatives?

Today, SaaS (Software as a Service) offers vastly lower Total cost of ownership, and delivers much, if not all the functionally of conventional locally hosted software – at a fraction of the price. (Salesforce.com etc).

Do you use Web2 communications? How often do you use wen-conferences for Quarterly Performance Reviews, or do you fly managers in from remote locations? Does the organization enable collaboration on projects through virtual networks? Do you create channels for employees to collaborate across time zones, and physical locations with having to leave their offices?

Today, Web 2 technologies enable us to manage major parts of our businesses offshore. Take technical drawing for example – why keep in in-house when it can be done offshore and managed fully effectively at a fraction of the cost on local services?

We must not forget Web2 Marketing – Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo are only the beginning.

Make 2011 your Year!

To find out more aboutBusiness Coaching, visit Global Consulting to learnExecutive coaching how we can assist your business to position for future growth.

Business activities are highly dependent upon interpersonal and negotiating skills of their managers or owners. It is through negotiation only, that the parties involved in the business activity can come to common grounds of interest. Hence, if you are unable to adopt a wise strategy to negotiate with the other party, the probability of failure is higher. Three most important elements of a useful negotiating strategy are commonly observed to include; the ability of building and maintaining trust between or amongst the parties involved, the timely decision making and using wise tactics to achieve your objective.

Trust is one element which is of extreme importance particularly in business dealings because in the absence of trust, you can never be sure of the other parties’ intentions. You might get involved in people who would fake being trustworthy, as a result of which, you would get in hot water. Therefore, for healthy negotiations with a party, you should be able to build and maintain trust. It is an inevitable fact that, regular and long-term interaction will give birth to trust in your relationship. If you are not taking the undue advantage of a little less stable position, or lack of information or any such factors which might make the other parties’ stand a bit shaky, you will seed trust in your business relationship. However, trusting any one blindly, particularly in the corporate world is an insane act. Hence, you should always check the track record of the parties involved and negotiate on terms, which will not expose you to much risk along with high returns.

Timeliness is as important as heart is for the human body, in other words, time dictates success in the business world. If you are not able to decide at the right time, you will lose millions of opportunities. Therefore, negotiators try to gauge your timeframe, so that they can make you get agreed to their terms which might make them take an undue advantage. It must be clearly understood, that if you have a considerable time period before you have to finalize a deal, you surely can enjoy more power and influence as a negotiator. Primarily, because you can look for other parties to deal with, that can agree to your conditions. So, time is of utmost importance when you intend to finalize negotiation in a win-win situation.

Negotiators always keep various tactics in his mind, which they employ in situations when time is getting out of hand, or they are not sure how to rate the other parties’ trustworthiness. These tactics are nothing but different conditions and steps that will keep your position safe from undue exploitation. Because the ultimate target of a negotiator, is to win the negotiations in his/her favor without allowing the other party take an unjustified advantage of their position.

A comprehensive view point on the roles played by all the three elements, trust, timeliness and tactics, highlights a set of situations. The ideal situation is, when the parties involved enjoy complete trust between/amongst each other, then the negotiator does not have to use time or tactics to influence power on others. A mediocre situation is where the trust element is weak and negotiators have to employ tactics and time pressure to turn the negotiations in their favor. But the worst situation is when along with the absence of trust; you also are short of time. Therefore, the role of negotiators in such situations becomes the most difficult, because all they have to play around with is the tactics building, to come out as a winner.

It can verifiably be said, that it is precisely the trust which makes negotiations a lot easier to flow. For a business, it is of vital importance to carry out a thorough analysis of all these three elements for each of their customers. This will highly aid it to keep their customers happy and their financial statements shinning, if you are a wise strategist; you should have these three Ts as a vital part of your negotiating strategies.

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Increasingly, successful products all have a new must-have feature, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve recognized it yet, but everyone seems to be extolling the virtues of their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that personally, when I’m choosing software, for example, I always want to see what it looks like before I’ll be bothered to download.

Beauty may be the new feature, but it is hardly the technological high-ground in the design stakes. That honor goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Apparently, when you have something that is “magical”, you’ve really just trumped all competition. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn’t even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being. Even for Apple, that’s a pretty big jump. The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won’t have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

Anyway, there is a point to all this, and it is this: we in large IT organizations always find that whatever feature the consumer has now, they will demand in the workplace in the next two years. Consequently, I’m predicting that we’ll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we’ll be rubbish at it when it happens. We are always surprised when stuff makes the jump from consumer to enterprise, and we never learn each time it happens.

So, in two years time, we’re going to have a dilemma. Shall we design “beautiful experiences” for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. So this stuff is going to cost more, at least at the start.

I think it will be easy for us all to say “not essential, cut it”.

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the “beauty-feature” becomes a main differentiator. It won’t matter if our systems are “magical’ in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

My prediction is that there will be further deterioration in the perception of users of their IT suppliers, namely that they can’t deliver to save themselves.

The Beauty-Feature is something that’s occupied those working in Innovation Management for some time now. For a detailed examination of this, and other things that concern organizational innovators, read the free, online innovation book by the author of this article.