As we come to the end of 2016 and start the business planning process for 2017 and beyond, business leaders around the world are going through a multitude of a strategic planning meetings where they are assessing where there are now, where are they going, and how they are they going to get there. Reviewing learnings from other successful and not-so-successful organizations should be part of every business planning review process. There are many organizations feeling strong and secure in their market positions and this blog is written for you with a warning; don’t get too secure! For organizations that currently maintain strong market positions, there are very good business lessons to be learned from the fall of Nokia’s smartphone marketplace dominance. As the graphic below illustrates in the second quarter of 2007, Nokia owned more than 50% of the global market share of smartphones. Today, it is a number that is hard to comprehend. By the end of the second quarter of 2013 - just 6 years later - Nokia’s market share declined to almost zero. It is shocking data which should be recognized and absorbed by business leaders so they can avoid the same mistakes Nokia did.
Are our Future Leaders Hungry Enough?
“You can have all of this value for an awesome price!”
“Compared to our competition, I’m offering you a really low price”
“We just launched this new product at an outrageously low initial price!”
As part of Advantexe’s work in the area of Strategic Business Selling, we have the opportunity to work with many different types of sales professionals ranging from high-tech sales to managed care pharmaceuticals sales. Recently, I have noticed a disturbing trend where sales professionals have been “adjectifying” price in their conversations with customers. As we all know, price is often a primary driver of decision making for most customers; however, there is something called the value dashboard that a customer uses to make a final decision and the other elements of the value dashboard beyond price play a part in the entire value proposition. Levels of service, product quality, product availability, brand, are just a few of the other possible elements of the value dashboard. The issue here is that by focusing too much on price by placing a strong adjective in front of it, you are separating price even further away from the other elements of the value dashboard which make the full value proposition.
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One of the many buzz words that has been bandied about by academic and leadership gurus over the past few years is the concept of “Agility.” A quick search of Google returns more than 58 million hits in less than half a second. While there are many great definitions, tools, applications, and usages of the tool called agility, too many business leaders have found them to be “soft” and note very practical in a volatile and complex business environment. For example, one of the executives I work with shared with me a concept one of her HR Business Partners brought forward for some sort of workshop called the “Waterfall” approach to business agility. The Waterfall Agility approach is based on the idea that the development and delivery of a company’s products and services are built exclusively around a process where you hire only well-trained and mature “experts” for critical jobs and these experts hand their work “over the wall” to the other experts that are moving very quickly to fulfill the promise to customers. This entire framework is built on the notion that experts are very good workers and never have to look back; but, if they make a mistake they can adjust quickly and keep moving forward.
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One of the most interesting things that I have observed during the past few months of working with large global organizations is that too many of them are trusting their R&D leaders to make critical business decisions without providing them with the Business Acumen skills and tools they need to make the right business choices. Think about the pharmaceutical company, the technology company, or the chemical company who is investing billions of dollars into R&D and product development by empowering teams to bring new products to market without the skills or tools to know if their decisions and actions will be successful.
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