Dateline: July 10, 2015
Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.
The only certainty about the future is that it will be different than the present. How good is your organization at responding to it’s changing environment? Historically, we’ve seen many examples of companies who notice a change but can’t respond in time. Or, as Professor Benn Konsynski at Emory University said, “if you start feeling change, then it might be too late to prepare, or respond.” Benn shared his thoughts on how CIOs can be prepared for the unknown in an interview with Jerry Kane at Sloan Management Review. Benn explains,
In many of these companies, it’s been sort of a collective realization either based on customer experience patterns, demographic trends in a market or other early market signals, such as looking in parallel markets and what’s happening there. Shock wakes people up, often too late for response.
I think a lot of it is challenging assumptions and beliefs about how their enterprises work, how their market works. The scariest thing to many of the large corporations is being blindsided by what some call the “ankle peckers” that come in and don’t operate within the historic rules of the system. They ignore the old rules of the market. They often arrive in mode of “cherry-picking” high-margin aspects of the market, and seek scale and scope more opportunistically.
To be prepared for future changes, Benn suggests bringing in new skills, even those that traditionally would not be on the short list of requirements for the job, to broaden the capabilities and challenge old assumptions. In short, thinking outside the box now can help you prepare for the future.
In our “remix era,” new skills and capabilities raise the value of an ability to rip things apart, assign new roles and responsibilities, and reassemble a new alignment of stakeholders that better serves the evolving markets. They challenge all assumptions of roles and responsibilities in their market.
What skills can you add to your staff’s portfolio to bring in new capabilities to prepare your IT organization for the unknown? Where can you find those skills?
That’s a WRAP! Have a great weekend!
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