I was on the phone to a senior executive from sales the other day and they relayed a conversation from a senior management away day they had attended.
All the senior management had been flown out to a country retreat and had been presented to. You will have attended one of these presentations before, I'm sure. The senior people said, we are big now and the plan is that we will be 10 times bigger in 5 years time.
That was it. No plan of how to do it.
Now we all know that if a company has got to be big by doing what they are doing, this is great and well done. But you won't get to being 10 times big in 5 years by doing the same thing.
We are living through changing times, in effect I would bet, if you carry on doing the same things as you are doing now, you won't be 10 times bigger than you are. You will be less bigger than you are.
I trained to be an Engineer at University and when I left and went into business, I asked a friend who had done a Business degree if I could read a book on business.
Without hesitation he recommended "In Search of Excellence" it's a classic, Peters and Waterman book about what makes great companies. None of the companies detailed in "Search of Excellence" exist.
The follow up to that book was "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. None of the excellent managed companies mentioned in that book are still around.
Over the last twenty years, well managed companies that people like Peters, Waterman and Collins were excellent companies don't exist anymore.
What got you here, won't get you there. In the world of social media, internet and mobile, do the same thing year on year isn't good enough anymore.
If you think about the levers you have to pull in a business to grow, there is the number of sales reps and the amount of money you spend on marketing. The only way you can get bigger is to increase the sales force or increase what you spend on marketing. Everybody knows this and everybody does this.
So what you going to do? How about disrupting the market?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Albert Einstein.
This is even more true in the world of business today!
Organizations all around the world are actively investing in advanced technologies to overhaul and update how companies work. But, the promise of digital transformation is more than being digital. It’s also about understanding how technology is affecting employees and customers. And, in my research, I find time and time again, that many executives are simply out of touch with how people are changing. You can’t reap the benefits of employee or customer happiness if you don’t know them.
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