Understanding and preparing for the new future

By David Wee, Founder, DW Associates | Jan 4, 2010

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Today’s organizations operate in a highly dynamic business context, which is compounded by complexity and uncertainty throughout the society.  For the immediate future, business leaders will have to master the disciplines of uncertainty.

The news today is not very good.  Every time we think we are on the upside of the downturn, we get thrown for another loop, hit with another crisis, told it will be just a few more months before all this turns around.

The unprecedented monetary stimulus, government guarantees, and injections of capital seem largely to have ended the short-term crisis that landed the capital and credit markets in the hospital.  But it remains unclear what will happen when the patient is taken off its medicine.
 
For the first time in a year, majority say economic conditions in their countries are better now than they were in September 2008.  Although the global news is good, there are marked regional differences; executives in the developed countries of Asia are generally the most optimistic, and those in Europe are the least.

However, a majority of executives around the world share the prevailing skepticism about consumers: when asked to name the biggest threat to future economic growth and to the growth of their own companies, most are concerned with low consumer demand and losing business to low-cost competitors.
 
It’s times like these when tremendous competitive success can be achieved.  It’s times like these where companies can shift positions in the marketplace.  It’s times like these when leaders can become followers, and followers can become leaders, because we are in a period where everything is now going to open and unfreeze.  The cheap are getting better, the better are getting cheaper.  Cheaper, better and faster is the new normal.
 
There are changes in lifestyle - people not going to movies, but watching at home; not eating out, but eating at home.  People are not going anymore for the premium skin care products or perhaps Starbucks.

Alternative selling channels (kiosks, home-shopping, internet retailing, service stations, vending, and direct selling have been introduced often.

The world population will be growing, if we like it or not, from the current six-and-a-half billion to about eight billion by 2030.  And that will not only give you more people, but it will also - as they improve their standard of living - create other opportunities for products to expand.

It is very clear that this world has tremendous challenges.  The challenges of poverty, of water, of global warming, climate change.

The worst mistake in strategy is to compete with your competitors on the same thing.  You want to find a different kind of value that you can deliver to a different set of customers.  Strategy is fundamentally about how you’re going to deliver unique value.

Technologies such as high-speed Internet, mobile broadband and GPS are enabling new ways of providing value to customers.  Not so long ago, the choices for anyone needing an automobile were to buy one, lease one, or rent one, by the day or by the week.  In each of these alternatives, the car was likely to sit unused in a lot or a garage for long stretches of time.  These models all provided great convenience - but at the price of great inefficiency.