"strategy needs to change as the world does"

ONE COLD, HARD truth laid bare by the pandemic is how vulnerable a business can become when strategic foresight and operational flexibility are low on the list of priorities for boards and leadership teams.

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strategy needs to change as the world does. Over the past 30 years we've lived through a remarkable era of macrostability, characterized by largely peaceful geopolitics, generally falling interest rates, expanding credit markets, and moderate inflation. During that time, five new trends in the business landscape emerged: globalization, capital superabundance, the declining cost of distance, labor superabundance, and, underlying all those, technology-led innovation. Winning companies adapted their organizations to the trends, embracing such mantras as "Move fast" and "Adapt or die" to create enormous amounts of value.

We've now entered a new era in which new rules apply. It's a time of post-globalization, capital rationalization, spatial dispersion, shrinking workforces, and dependence on automation. Meanwhile, technology-led innovation is only accelerating and compounding. In this environment, the intuitions that leaders have developed over the past few decades will cease to be useful-and the shape of opportunity and risk will be entirely different.

If leaders want to continue creating value in the era of volatility, they must still focus on adaptability. But they'll also need to revive strategies that boost investment in two other capabilities that have fallen out of favor in recent years: resilience and prediction. Ultimately, every company will need a strategy that allocates time, resources, and energy to all three capabilities."

Trechos retirados de "How to Succeed in an Era of Volatility"

"most large organizations can’t and don’t change as fast "

Arrisco enveredar por uma linguagem que não aprecio para dizer que só em Portugal é que se acha que as empresas grandes são eternas, talvez por causa da protecção do estado, talvez por causa do nosso crony-capitalism militante. Ainda há dias, "Empresas. Quando ser grande não impede a queda ou a falência".

"why should great companies falter? This is perhaps one of the greatest surprises in business, for if any organizations should succeed and endure, why shouldn’t it be the ones with the most resources and the largest customer bases, not to mention most cash and the broadest global reach? The answer is that they may not be the ones with the best ideas!
Somehow in the process of becoming successful, large, and global, the policies, practices, and habits that worked so well in stable conditions, and which were quite necessary for largeness, also rendered these organizations non-adaptive. Confronted with rapid change, they are not organized to respond adequately; again and again we have seen companies grow huge and then struggle to sustain their market position because their very hugeness inhibits their ability to adapt.
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When markets change and new ideas take hold, as they inevitably do, most large organizations can’t and don’t change as fast. Instead, newer, more nimble competitors capture market share by innovating where the entrenched giants cannot. Well, actually it may not be true to say that they cannot. But for whatever reason, and although they certainly could, they usually do not.
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The most compelling is that there’s a gap between the reality of accelerating change and our understanding of what’s really happening. Simply put, too many leaders have a flawed mental picture of the market because they don’t grasp the magnitude and impact of change, and they underestimate its importance to their own organizations. They manage as though markets were stable when they’re anything but; they create slow, hierarchical organizations that concentrate power, emphasize standardization, and seek conformity, when innovation and creativity would serve them - and their shareholders - far better. And these errors are compounded by an analytical thinking style that promotes fragmentation, and causes them to lose sight of the big picture."

Trechos retirados de "Permanent Innovation" de Langdon Harris.

Adaptabilidade

Este texto de Gary Hamel, "What is Adaptability?" serve tanto para as empresas como para todos os outros tipos de organizações humanas e não só:

"Strategic adaptability, by contrast, refers to a company’s capacity to reconfigure its underlying business concept, by dramatically rethinking . . .

• Its core mission
• Its primary value proposition
• The identify and nature of the end customer
• The method or channels of distribution
• Its revenue or pricing model
• The markets or industries in which it competes
• Its core competencies
• Its ecosystem of business partners
• The degree to which it is vertically or horizontally integrated
• The basic way in which it produces products and services"

Num mundo em mudança acelerada, em mudança turbulenta, é preciso estar preparado para mudar...  esta lista de Hamel quase  preenche todos os campos do business model canvas de Osterwalder.
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Ficar a lamber feridas e a brandir direitos adquiridos perdidos não serve para nada, o objectivo é seduzir clientes.
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Seth Godin neste artigo "Seth Godin: 5 Ways to Grow Your Market" dá vários excelentes exemplos de mudanças:

"Position your product or service at the "logical extreme" of some aspect of your product category. For example, if the typical product in your market is expensive but comes with free service, make your product free and charge a subscription fee for the service. If you're making a commodity product, go for something either huge or tiny."

Existe sempre uma alternativa.

“If you are getting whipped playing by the existing rules, get used to losing or change the game. If you can’t win by standing and fighting then run and hide. If you can’t win by being big, be small. If you can’t win by being small, be big. The first rule of winning is that there is no one way to win.”

Existe sempre uma alternativa, tem é de ser construída. Raramente é óbvia ou fácil.

Trecho retirado de "Adaptability" de Max McKeown