Business Corner
STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS
BY PHIL PHILLIPS, PHD
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
PHILLIPS@CHEMARKCONSULTING.NET
Culture and strategic leadership: Part II
Along with
leadership,
strategic and
organizational
changes must
be made for a
company to
reinvent itself.
In last month’s Business Corner column we discussed the shift in business value over time and the need for the organization to reinvent itself and its culture. We submitted that many times an organization must
change leadership in order to effectively
change the company culture and set the
organization up for adaptive change. However,
strategic and organizational changes must
also be made along with the leadership.
To say that the future is difficult to see is
old hat, but true. To predict that sometime
between now and 2017 your organization will
be assaulted to its core by change in your
business environment and, therefore, forced
to make unparalleled changes itself, is accurate. Your business will have two choices:
• Acclimatize or fade;
• Reinvent itself or agonize through the reorganization and restructuring process.
History indicates that the latter is more
likely than the former since few organizations
are adaptable enough to change ahead of
future trend curves.
Companies with outdated business models
are strewn across our business highways that
were once blue-chip Wall Street darlings. In
the auto sector GM and Chrysler are prime
examples. In retail, Sears and K-Mart are
good examples of industry icons with past
success that have failed to reinvent them-
selves in tempo with the “curve.”
Certainly the business environment has
changed but the most notable change is
change itself. We have witnessed over the
past ten years remarkable changes in eco-
nomic power (China); communications (webi-
nars, on-line meetings, tweeting, blogs); and
climate (degradation) to name a few.
However, the most disruptive dynamic is the
acceleration of the velocity of change.
The organization that will make it through
this rapid change tempo will be the one that
has the capacity for adaption. As mentioned,
some very large and historically successful
companies have demonstrated that they did
not have sufficient capacity to adapt to
change. Therefore, the question you must ask
yourself is: “Are we changing as fast as the
world is?”
Too many executives are content with peri-
odically tweaking their products and services
while thinking their strategies, business mod-
els, competencies and core values are perpet-
ual. To grasp success, as a business culture,
while the future conditions change at warp
speeds before us, we must not make the mis-
take of judging the temporary as timeless.
Today, almost everything is temporary.
