NOVEMBER 2015 / NO. 2
TAGS: AGILE, MANAGEMENT, BANKS, GOVERNMENTS, MEDIA, EUROPE, CRISIS, EU, IMD, WORLD COMPETITIVENESS SCOREBOARD, MARKETS
The agile company
“To become an agile company means gaining the ability to see both opportunities and threats and then executing the strategies needed to address them”
Strategic intelligence enables top management to foresee the opportunities and threats in a timely fashion. At the end of the day who is accountable? Being agile as a company depends on developing two key capabilities: responsiveness and organizational flexibility. Many of us see new business opportunities. However, most of us are concerned that our companies lack the skills needed to meet future competitive threats. But it is not just competition, rather competitiveness, that counts. Strategic responsiveness is the ability to sense new risks and new opportunities in the business environment and craft a quick response to those pressures. Organizational flexibility is the ability to shift execution rapidly.
Companies face these challenges, but what about countries? Our banks, governments and the media tell us that Europe is ‘out of crisis’, performing with low growth rates of 0.5 to 2.0 percent. Concerning strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility, it will be interesting to look at the EU’s competitiveness and not limit ourselves merely to the EU’s internal market.
The 2015 IMD World Competitiveness Scoreboard of 60 countries showed two key trends:
Countries which lost competitiveness: Germany, France, UK, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary;
Countries which gained competitiveness: Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Poland and the southern European countries Portugal, Spain, Italy and even Greece.
According to the IMD, productivity and efficiency are in the driver’s seat of competitiveness. Business efficiency requires greater productivity, and the competitiveness of countries is greatly linked to the ability of companies to remain profitable over time. Increasing productivity remains a fundamental challenge for all countries. But here we face another problem: gains in productivity are about the long term and not the short term.
“Strategic intelligence enables top management to increase future competitiveness, whereby strategic intelligence serves, in effect, as the CEO’s Chief of Staff”
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