What business strategy is dominating the entrepreneur’s world? Do you practice them on your leadership skills? Here are the 7 management concepts that will dominate business in the coming years according to a study by strategy + business magazine.
Entrepreneurs and managers know that the world of business is an environment of intense competition and complexity. But it is where they chose to develop and make a career. For this reason, daily there are those who advance to find the most efficient formula to handle business.
Many seek in management ideas a diagnosis, a better understanding of the problems that prevent their companies from efficiently acting, while thought leaders seem more interested in the forecast, in glimpsing what will lead us, in the future, to be better strategists.
Whether in present or future, all aim to find the best business ideas. And it is known that an excellent business idea has five qualities. It is timely, tackles a current issue in a new and attractive way; has explanatory power, revealing the interrelationships and hidden patterns that shape the phenomenon we see. It has a practical value, can be put into practice to produce replicable results; has a solid empirical foundation, can be experienced in real life; has a natural support group, key people are willing to listen to it.
In the study developed by the strategy + business magazine, senior management executives prepared an extensive list of these ideas and submitted them to a broad vote. Thus they managed to give a projection of the concepts that will preside the business in the next years. Here we explain the 7 most outstanding:
1. Execution
Success does not depend so far on strategic choices as on proper implementation. As Lar and Bossidv and Rain Charan point out in their book Execution, the most critical quality of managers is the ability to put ideas into action. “Execution” does not mean paying attention to figures and indicators; instead, it is about looking at the whole process, finding small ways to improve each part of it individually, actually applying those improvements, monitoring results to assess effectiveness, and then repeat the process.
2. The learning organization
The learning organization is the one that was deliberately designed to encourage its members to think, innovate, collaborate, speak frankly, improve their abilities and make a personal commitment to the collective future, thereby increasing the firm’s competitive advantage in the long term.
Even the most efficient managers know that to gain a competitive advantage it is necessary to develop people’s learning ability. In addition to sharing knowledge and skills, it involves cultivating the personal habits that lead people to be more capable.
3. Corporate Values
Companies that care about ethics, trust, citizenship, and even for meaning and spirituality in the workplace, perform better on the market than those who are only interested in money.
4. Managing customer relationships
Cultivating long-term relationships with consumers, and being aware of their needs, generates highly focused companies, who treat their customers as relatives. This happens with Snap-on Tools, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Apple Computers, Starbucks and the Red Sock baseball team from Boston.
5. Disruptive technology
Technological innovation radically alters markets because it undermines existing companies, which are more vulnerable because their supply is rigidly adapted to the needs of their current customers. Personal computer manufacturers defeated Digital Equipment; Wal-Mart defeated Sears, and music of the Web is beating the record industry. In a way, the idea of Professor Christensen remains in force because it consists of two parts. First, a warning: the most valued policies and practices, in this case, the venerated sanctity of a successful relationship with the client, may include the seed of their own destruction. Second, an escape route leaves your comfort zone and adopt the disruptive technology before others do.
6. Leadership Development
Do not settle for designating the “right” people, when you could train all your employees to make better decisions and be better strategists and, ultimately, better leaders. Leadership is essential, not so much by the measures that leaders take, as by those made by others on their behalf.
7. Organizational DNA
Leaders can design an organization’s structures – incentives, decision-making distribution, hierarchical relationships, and information flows? And align them with each other and with the strategic objectives, to induce a high performance.