8 Golden Rules to Transform a Company in the 21st century
As Start Ups and smaller companies are having easier access to many new technologies with lower entrance barriers and leveraging crowd/community, low cost experimentation using existing platforms as well as third party assets they become able to develop faster new solutions or new business models creating their own niches that are growing very fast ( 3-5 years ) to big businesses with big valuations. e g Whats App, AirBnB or Uber. These companies have the same multibillion USD valuations within 3-5 years as it took companies 20 years ago 10-15 years.
What will be the result of such acceleration of new business creations with new technologies penetrating faster and faster almost all existing industries? For this there is no 1 answer but many for different industries and markets:
A very competitive and faster by day business environment
Creation of new Industries from merging of old ones with addition of new elements
Creation of tremendous wealth and abundance
Many companies will almost monopolize their market. The winner takes almost all will be the result
Creation of new industries based on combination of new technologies
Many companies will need to reorganize and transform themselves to survive and thrive or go bust
What are the most important golden rules to be applied the coming decades for successful transformations of companies that have been complacent and did not change timely to seize opportunities within the new under creation faster and different business ecosystems. Although there will be exceptions for very specific industries or market niches the rules will be applicable to the most of the industries with faster applicability where the Information content is bigger in the business. In many cases the disruptions will be so severe that if the company is not diversified enough it might not be able to survive.
In this article I describe what the company should do before it is really disrupted or in the early stage of disruption. So what should be the top golden rules for the CEO or the initial core team that is entrusted with the task to transform the business?
Assemble the right team with the necessary skills & competences for the company/industry (include outsiders is vital) in concern and analyze the company ecosystem as first step. People first.
Create a new transformative purposefor the company, its employees and all other stakeholders in order to be able to align and be guided during the transformation journey especially when things getting tough. According to recent university research from USA and UK the 21st century motivators are: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery.
Create a task force to evaluate options in technology, product, customer experience, process & business model and shift as much as possible from material based world (even only partly is valuable ) to an information based one.By leveraging information from community/crowd any reduction in the marginal cost of supply is fundamental for success.
Plan at least 10x improvement in Performance and practice always AND … AND … e.g Faster AND Cheaper AND Better AND …..
Allow a lot of experimentation especially during the product, system or platform creation with customers and the community in general.
Leverage as much as possible third party assets, community/crowd and use more staff on demand.
As the business environment is accelerating create the conditions for faster decision making through modern internal collaboration/social networking tools, automate through algorithms and interfaces with the external world and allow formuch more autonomy especially at the organizational edges closer to the customer.
Establish the culture that will maintain a successful organisation. The Organisational Purpose, the company values and the social tools are the key ingredients necessary for the company to scale and succeed.
Any other important rules?
Does it make sense for your industry?
Any other comments?
Thank you very much
Mike Mastroyiannis is a Businesss & Executive Coach and Consultant for among others Exponentially Disruptive Innovations. He has served as CEO of business units in Multinationals, founded or lead start-ups and serves in advisory boards. He can be reached through LinkedIn email at mike@tenx2.com