The following techniques can help you pinpoint your
enterprise's strengths and weaknesses regarding the skills,
learning environment, and incentives you need to succeed in
surpassing the future best practice and approaching the
ideal best practice for locating, anticipating, and
adapting to changing irresistible forces.
Create Scenarios to Reveal Your Level of Capability
Most businesses can address three or four scenarios
successfully at the same time. In testing for skills,
learning environment, and incentives, these scenarios can
give you a dry run on the kind of actual changes you may
face in the future.
Using the scenarios will help reveal the strengths and
weaknesses of your current skills and experience. Here are
some ideas for scenarios that will test these factors for
you:
What scenario can you study that will be the most
challenging for your group to adapt to?
Think of this approach as a variation on the Nth-degree
test (looking at extreme forms of irresistible forces). Try
to identify the most recalcitrant aspects of organizational
resistance to change, a particularly knotty irresistible
force.
What scenario can you study that will create the most
potential confusion in implementing a new direction?
Many companies unknowingly select strategies that depend on
a certain business environment, such as the growth of one
channel of distribution at the expense of another. Should
these trends reverse for some reason, a lot of
organizational thinking quickly becomes obsolete.
For example, the old rules of thumb for one part of the
market may be a disaster for the other market segment.
Value-added resellers of computers need a high selling
price on their equipment to make money. Direct sellers of
computers need a low selling price to offset their lower
value-added. If you suddenly choose to compete in both
channels, how do you price your computers and be successful
in both channels? What scenario can you examine
that will be most dangerous to your organization's health
and vitality?
Developing such scenarios is helpful in focusing people's
minds on survival, something that they usually care about.
In that context, concerns will be more realistic about
where to make changes in skill levels and incentives. Such
a scenario could be one whereby your company's reputation
was harmed in some fundamental way such that customers were
inclined to shun your products and services.
What scenario would cost you the largest number of your
critically skilled people?
Many firms suddenly collapse because of the loss of one or
two people. Creating a scenario that causes widespread loss
of skills helps focus attention on the need to back up
those skills in other people, and what may be currently
lacking in the learning environment. For many companies
today, such a circumstance could be triggered by a
continuing collapse of your own stock price while the
stocks of competitors stayed high. Highly capable
executives and technical people would see that they could
earn vastly more money from the same efforts elsewhere.
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
----------------------------------------------------
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an
Optimist, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The
Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for
accomplishing 20 times more by registering at:
====> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .
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