All Intelligence Briefings that have been published by Rodenberg Tillman & Associates can be found here.
Trust in society is under huge pressure. We can see some extremely negative developments which are out of the control of our politicians, who unfortunately do not have the courage to take the necessary tough decisions.
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.
In our book “Strategic Intelligence in Future Perspectives 2.0” we discussed a wide variety of some twenty-five companies that lost momentum because they failed to react in a timely fashion to discontinuous changes in their external business development. We described why this happens to so many companies and what can be done to overcome this. Here we explain how to do this.
“Why don’t companies last forever? Why do so many companies face serious problems after years of success? Why does management not react if the success rate of organizations comes to an end?”This is because your company’s internal business intelligence dashboards, your big-data analytics, and the managers with titles like market insights, customer insights, marketing intelligence and market intelligence do not deliver the right intelligence!
We generally never deal with the same topic three times in a row. But in this case we have to, because there is so much wrong in the financial sector. What do you think about the above quote from the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, listed by TIME Magazine as being in the Top-100 most influential people in the world? To us this of great concern, though most people in the world don’t realize it.
The book “It Can’t Be True”, published in February 2015, was based on 2 years of research from over 200 in-depth interviews in the City of London. In his book. Luyendijk makes comparisons with the world of animals: traders are baboons, investment bankers are tigers, back-office employees are hard-working beavers and the departments of compliance and risk management are ants. The majority of the employees in the sector are therefore beavers and ants whose task is to control the tigers and baboons. Mission impossible!
“Management can never be completely comfortable with its strategic choices because the company is then at risk of missing the dynamics of change in their business environment”The statement above is about strategy, the most difficult topic in business today. Strategy is not about vision-mission-objectives-strategies.
We frequently ask ourselves “Why doesn’t top management see change?” In 2014, the Dutch financial newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad, published an astonishing article about another international Dutch company taken by surprise: SBM Offshore. This company is active in the global offshore oil & gas exploration business. The newspaper heading was “Market forces us to lay off jobs”.
The statement above was made by Tarun Khanna in Harvard Business Review in both September and November 2014. Context is the background in which a future event takes place, it is often real or perceived and includes factors such as geography, genders, industries, job roles, attitudes, beliefs, values, politics, cultures, symbols, organizational climate, the past, personal ethics and the preferred future.
This statement by Paul van Riel, CEO of Fugro, in the Dutch financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad on 30th October, 2014. Fugro is the world’s largest integrator of geotechnical survey, subsea and geosciences services. The company is 70-80 percent dependent on what is going on in the oil and gas sector. In September 2013, Fugro launched its new “Growth through Leadership” strategy aimed at an annual growth of 10 percent in the next couple of years. In the spring of 2014, the first warnings were issued regarding under-performance and pressure on profitability.