History shows that it is during times of “mega-transition” and/or discontinuities that new ideas are born and new rules take root. As partners of our clients, we continually examine how leaderships of organizations should find the bright spots that are often hidden in turbulent competitive landscape(s) and in turn define the likely game changing plays that they could organize in moving forward.
Partha Ghosh believes that seven emerging trends will have profound impact on how industry leaders shape their strategies, develop their organizations and run their operations.
- Convergence of technologies, especially tera-level to nano level technologies, will create new economic ecosystems: Fresh perspectives on how new possibilities might evolve at the confluence of tera-level to nano level technologies will be essential
- Influence of Big Data and Advanced Analytics will define competitive advantage: Velocity of value creation and speed of responsiveness based on granular/high resolution insights will define competitive advantage
- Intensifying concerns and advocacies on relating to global warming and resource constraints: Efficiency of resource mobilization in harmony with the diverse, often opposing expectations of a full range of stakeholders, to proactively ensure that the integrity of the environment is increasingly preserved
- Y-Generation and “value mobilization” of knowledge workers: Because of widening divides between the attitudes toward the workplace, cross-generational organizational models will be need to be nurtured to integrate multiple tiers of attitudes and expectations towards a common purpose
- Deepening influence of social media on the evolving networked environment: Leading (distinct from managing) in a world connected through social media will require higher level expression of genuine & dynamic empathy, transparency & ethics of thought and work flows, through innovation in leadership development models
- Shift in geo-economic equations between regions: New modes of engagement with different regions will require approaches tailored towards local communities, bound within a multifaceted, universally accepted global framework that sets out the precepts of good corporate citizenship
- Rising tensions between Wall street (wealth creation) and Main street (social good): New operational models will evolve that dynamically integrate (not just balance) social consciousness/macroeconomic requirements with the investment community’s growing demands for better economic returns: perhaps charting a new course in the evolution of capitalism
The emerging trends will require leaderships of businesses to make transformational adjustments so that their business models do not get disrupted, if not renewed with higher level of aspiration to capture the significant value creation possibilities on the upside. It is not too difficult to sense how profound transformational impact all of them together might have on the future business environment worldwide. Companies must work towards defining the “essential logic” that should help them to harness the power of the seven trends in harmony with each other.
Leaderships must find ways to explore frontier trends by developing and fusing new skill sets with conventional wisdom that they have earned over decades of experience, - to drive the next era advancement of the industry they are in. Given the likely scale of impact and the degree of strategic and operational orchestration and cultural change that will be required, active engagement from the CEO and senior leaders is essential.
It is Partha Ghosh’s firm conviction to break old habits and to realize the value of flexibility in today’s dynamic environment, strategic management process must capture possibilities and probabilities with a rigorous analytical discipline, deploy new ways to guide the management with options and choices, and help improve strategic decision-making process. Exhibit below provides a high-level view of the framework that PSG Academy use in serving leaderships of organizations.
PSG Academy believes Strategic Management must be a symbiosis of “art of imagination” and the science of “systems oriented thinking”, based on deep analytical rigor. Senior management of companies will have to find imaginative ways of sketching out game-changing possibilities by realizing that Cross Boundary Solutions will continually emerge to break the constructs of conventional industries. As businesses undertake mega-capital projects and attempt to take advantage of the convergence of technologies from different domains, companies will have to work with multiple tiers of vendors and service providers – just as companies such as Boeing and Toyota have worked with numerous suppliers in the aerospace and automotive industries, as does Apple and Space-X.
These relationships will depend on the nature of the assets being developed and their particular technological requirements – from nano/micro level technologies, such as micro sensors, to tera-level technologies, such as satellite-based communication systems. Not only will relationships be different for different assets, but they could evolve over the lifecycle of a particular asset, adding new members, for example. As in the movie industry, project leaders across industries must increasingly be able to bring together different actors with wide-ranging skill sets to extract value from specific assets.
Accordingly businesses must also be prepared to adapt and modify the form of cooperation and collaboration as projects matures. Organizations will need to develop the leadership capacity to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct cross-industry ecosystems quickly, which often in a hierarchical command and control organization construct difficult to achieve.
Partha Ghosh believes today in view of increasing uncertainties leadership of organizations must have access to wider set of options to make and as required rebalance strategic bets. Accordingly, PSG Academy continually underscores that the role of strategic management process is not to predict the future and eliminate the management’s fear of the unknown by documenting the strategic direction that has already been set. The role of strategic management process is to
- provide analytically sound understanding of the dynamics of the competitive market place
- offer set of strategic options (for different scenarios) that
- guide management to structure and make hard decisions and place intelligent bets.