“Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it can’t be done – figure out a way to do it!”– Futurist Jim Carroll
Daily Inspiration: “Imagination is exercise for the mind”
“Imagination is exercise for the mind” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Daily Inspiration: “Those Who Succeed Possess a Daring Need for Speed!”
“Those who succeed possess a daring need for speed!” – Jim Carroll
One of my key themes through the years has been that “faster is the new fast” — that the biggest challenge that organizations must face is how to keep up with the high-velocity economy.
I’m now observing that in many markets and industries, the pace of change is so fast that we need to put in place a senior executive whose sole area of responsibility is ensuring that the organization can keep up with ever-increasing rates of change. Let’s say — a Chief Momentum Officer.
Organizations need to adapt to all kinds of different issues when it comes to the velocity of change: rapidly changing business models, the emergence of new competitors, ever-shrinking product life-cycles, a faster pace of new product development, furious rates of technological innovation, furiously fast new trends in terms of customer interaction, the decreasing shelf-life of knowledge and the more rapid emergence of specialized skills: the list could go on!
Hence, a need for someone who aligns all of the moving parts of the organization to high-velocity change! This individual will carry a number of responsibilities, such as:
- managing the product innovation pipeline, so that the organization has a constant supply of new, innovative products, as existing products become obsolete, marginalized, or unprofitable
- managing the talent pipeline, so that the organization has the ability to quickly ingest all kinds of specialized new skills
- managing the technology pipeline, so that the organization can adapt itself to constantly improving and ever-more sophisticated IT tools that will help to better manage, run, grow and transform the business
- maintain and continually enhance brand and corporate image; as I’ve written here many times before, brands can become “tired” and irrelevant if they aren’t continually freshened and refreshed
- ensuring that the organization is continuing to explore new areas for opportunity and that it has the right degrees of innovation momentum
- that the business processes and structure of the organization are fine-tuned on a continuous basis so that it can keep up with all the fast-change swirling around it
- ensuring that a sufficient number of “experiential” programs are underway with respect to the product, branding, markets, and other areas so that the overall expertise level of the organization is continually enhanced
In other words, the CMO has two key responsibilities:
- keeping a fine-tuned eye on the trends which will impact the organization in the future, and which will serve to increase the velocity that the organization is subjected to and;
- keeping their hands on the appropriate levers throughout the organization such that it can keep evolving at the pace that these future trends will demand.
I don’t know if that makes perfect sense, but I think it’s a good issue to think about.
Daily Inspiration: “Are you going to let your Uber-moment turn into a Kodak moment?”
“Are you going to let your Uber-moment turn into a Kodak moment?” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Daily Inspiration: “Agility is the Only Antidote for Velocity”
“Agility is the only antidote for velocity” – Jim Carroll
One recent client engaged me for a talk for their global team, with the keynote title “Achieving Agility: Aligning Ourselves for an Era of Accelerating Change”. That’s a good example of how I outline the attributes for success in a world of high velocity change. With that, I focus on how organizations and leaders must incorporate four key capabilities: agility, insight, innovation and execution.
Corporate agility concept is perhaps the most critical: organizations must presume that the rate of change today is so fast that product lifecycles are collapsing, business models are relentlessly shifting, and customers are unforgiving and fleeting. To name just a few key trends!
Agility implies that we must innovate and adapt based on rapidly changing circumstances, on a continuous basis.
How do we do that? By adopting several key guiding principles that form the basis for all corporate strategy and activities going forward:
- plan for short term longevity: No one can presume that markets, products, customers and assumptions will remain static: everything is changing instantly. Business strategies and activities must increasingly become short term oriented while fulfilling a long term mission.
- presume lack of rigidity: Many organizations undertake plans based on key assumptions. Agile organizations do so by presuming that those key assumptions are going to change regularly over time, and so build into their plans a degree of ongoing flexibility.
- design for flexibility : In a world of constant change, products or services must be designed in such a way that they can be quickly redesigned without massive cost and effort. Think like Google: every product and service should be a beta, with the inherent foundation being one of flexibility for future change.
- build with extensibility: Apple understood the potential for rapid change by building into the iPod architecture the fundamental capability for other companies to develop add-on products. Think the same way : tap into the world. Let the customer, supplier, partners and others innovate on your behalf!
- harness external creativity: In a world in which knowledge is evolving at a furious pace, no one organization can do everything. Recogize your limits, and tap into the skills, insight and capabilities of those who can do things better.
- plan for supportability: Customers today measure you by a bar that is raised extremely high — they expect you to deliver the same degree of high-quality that they get from the best companies on the planet. They expect instant support, rapid service, and constant innovation. If you don’t provide this, they’ll simply move on to an alternative.
- revisit with regularity: Banish complacency. Focus on change. Continually revisit your plans, assumptions, models and strategies, because the world next week is going to be different than that of today.
To me, that’s what agility is all about!
Daily Inspiration: ”Being relentless optimistic is the best strategy for innovation yet!”
”Being relentless optimistic is the best strategy for innovation yet!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
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