The digital revolution is underway with the biggest hotel chain Airbnb that doesn’t even own a single hotel room, and Uber, the biggest taxi-company that doesn’t even own a single car. The value-chain as we know it will change and be replaced by service-offering systems. This has already happened with the telecom, travel and music sectors. During the next 10 years some 70% of jobs will disappear!
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.
“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!
What a statement! This comes from Gallup’s study “State of the American Workplace 2013”, published in HBR in May 2014. Is the situation any different in Europe? We think the percentages are more or less similar for Europe. How can this be changed?
In the previous post “Companies compete in arenas, not in sectors of industry” we explained how crucial it is to go beyond an industry analysis towards analyses of arenas. This means it is no longer enough to look at the industry sector in which your company competes. A further step Is required, namely conducting an analysis of the ‘competitive arena’.
Can you imagine that five years after the financial crisis, the financial system in Europe has still not yet improved? Banks still continue to package ‘risky financial products’ into special entities. Our bankers still behave the same as they did before the financial crisis. Why is this so? Bankers think they are better protected against the next financial crisis, because they have a higher percentage of equity on total assets. It’s business as usual all over again.
In November 2013, Professor Admati was in Amsterdam presenting her book “The Bankers’ New Clothes” and speaking about the false lobby of the Dutch National Employer’s Organization VNO-NCW on Dutch banks. The professor sees herself as “a voice in the wilderness” because banks in the Netherlands and Europe want to keep to the 3% requirement of equity on total assets.
“The more threatening externalities become for a company, the more there is a need to have strategic intelligence in place. Every company faces a continuous flow of threatening externalities”This statement is clear to everybody. But to foresee those threatening externalities, companies need to be able to monitor them in a timely fashion. A couple of years ago, I gave presentations about the “Management of Insights” and the “Management of Foresight” at the Dutch National Marketing Insights Event.
The word crisis refers to a decisive moment or turning-point, which the euro never seems to reach. The single currency’s complaint is more like a chronic illness that is neither serious enough to kill the patient nor weak enough to be easily cured.Employment in the public sector: Is this a new time-bomb?