All organisations interested in long term survival have the same core challenge - how to successfully manage the realities of today while at the same time making room for tomorrow. Failing with one of these choices will make most businesses vanish sooner or later.
The global wheels of business are spinning faster and faster and companies are dying quicker than ever before. This is the unanimous picture given in many articles from Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Boston Consulting Group and many other trustworthy sources.
You are likely aware of these challenges and difficulties and you also know how to provide value to your customers. Still, it is not easy to create sustainable business over time and there is not much hands-on practical information on how to future proof your business. The aim with Future Business Institute is to provide just that information.
When you learn more about future proofing your business, you will hopefully share these lessons with others on this site, so that we all can learn together.
We think that you, the person reading this, is a leader who is ready and skilled to making things happen. You might also be an adviser to the same leaders. Regardless, you are serious about what you do and want to build an organisation that survives medium and longer term. You realize this requires strong action, if not yesterday at least today.
Why is future proofing so important!
Alright, so future proofing, innovation or entrepreneurship are words that keep popping up in your organisation and your head. And with the board of directors, perhaps. But why, and why now? What is happening in the world that is making these areas more important than just ten years ago?
To dig a little deeper we use the three time Horizons defined in the publication "The Alchemy of Growth" written by Mehrdad Baghai et al. In their formulation, Horizon 1 corresponds to managing the current business with all its short-term concerns, Horizon 2 to develop the next generation of opportunities, and Horizon 3 to look ahead for new businesses that will sustain the firm far into the future.
We do not suggest you should investigate and choose a specific Horizon to work on. Many organisations not even investigate, for example they just define a percentage of their work effort for innovation or form a special organisation for innovation or maintenance. The demands of the market is simple changing too fast for you to be able to select a Horizon and adjust your organisation accordingly.
Our suggestion is that you build an organisation with the ability to, based on demand, switch focus on what currently is most important for your business. The organisation should be built from a holistic market view giving coworkers a possibility to grasp the whole picture of the business value delivered.
All of the above is true not only for entire companies but also parts of companies. With an increased need for speed large, organisations just have to decentralize control and also profit and loss responsibility. This means Future Proofing your business is of equal importance weather you are a CEO or a manager of a department.
Summer is great for creative working. 5 weeks off from core business and instead slack and reflection about future business. I decided to make parts of the internal wiki public, since I discovered Atlassian is providing this feature for free. Just a small configuration change and suddenly anyone have access, fun!
From now on I will be much more transparent and put stuff directly in the public Knowledge Base.
Mats